EUROSPEECH 2003 - INTERSPEECH 2003 8th European Conference on Speech Communication and Technology Geneva, Switzerland September 1-4, 2003

A New Approach to Reducing Alarm Noise in Speech

Yilmaz Gul (1), Aladdin M. Ariyaeeinia (2), Oliver Dewhirst (1)

(1) Fulcrum Voice Technologies, U.K.
(2) University of Hertfordshire, U.K.

This paper presents a new single channel noise reduction method for suppressing periodic alarm noise in telephony speech. The presence of background alarm noise can significantly detract from the intelligibility of telephony speech received by emergency services, and in particular, by the fire brigade control rooms. The attraction of the proposed approach is that it targets the alarm noise without affecting the speech signal. This is achieved through discriminating the alarm noise by appropriately modelling the contaminated speech. The effectiveness of this method is confirmed experimentally using a set of real speech data collected by the Kent Fire Brigade HQ (UK).

Full Paper

Bibliographic reference.  Gul, Yilmaz / Ariyaeeinia, Aladdin M. / Dewhirst, Oliver (2003): "A new approach to reducing alarm noise in speech", In EUROSPEECH-2003, 1225-1228.