Dual-Microphone Noise Reduction in Car Environments With Determinant Analysis of Input Correlation Matrix

In this paper, a novel noise reduction technique is proposed to improve the speech interface performance in car environments. The proposed noise reduction method with dual microphones is primarily based on the determinant analysis of the input correlation matrix. Through the analysis, a robust feature for speech activity detection and signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) estimation is derived. Using the feature, the SNR of each time-frequency component is estimated, and an enhanced speech signal is obtained through Wiener filtering. To evaluate the proposed noise reduction technique, we constructed a database in a real car environment and comparatively analyzed the performances of noise reduction methods. The results show that meaningful SNR and perceptual speech quality improvements with less signal distortion are achieved compared with the other competing methods.