Narrow Results

An important stage in speech enhancement is to estimate noise signal which is a difficult task in non-stationary and low signal-to-noise conditions. This paper presents an iterative speech enhancement approach which requires no prior knowledge of noise and is based on low-rank sparse matrix decomposition using Gammatone filterbank and convex distortion measure. To estimate noise and speech, the noisy speech is decomposed into low-rank noise and sparse-speech parts by enforcing sparsity regularization. The exact distribution of noise signals and noise estimator is not required in this approach. The experimental results demonstrate that our approach outperforms competing methods and yields better overall speech quality and intelligibility. Moreover, composite objective measure reinforced a better performance in terms of residual noise and speech distortion in adverse noisy conditions. The time-varying spectral analysis validates significant reduction of the background noise.

This paper first discusses the relationship between the rank null space property (NSP) and the nuclear norm minimization. Several versions of the rank NSP, i.e. the stable rank NSP, robust rank NSP and Frobenius robust rank NSP are proposed, and their equivalent forms are derived. At the same time, it is shown that the stable rank NSP is weaker than the rank restricted isometry property (RIP) to recover the low-rank matrices via the nuclear norm minimization. Finally, the rank NSP is extended to the case of Schatten-$q$ NSP for $0<q<1$, and the solutions to the Schatten-$q$ quasi-norm minimization are characterized by the different types of Schatten-$q$ NSP.