Noise and distortion that degrade the quality of speech signals can come from any number of sources. The technology and techniques for dealing with noise are almost as numerous, but it is only recently, with the development of inexpensive digital signal processing hardware, that the implementation of the technology has become practical. Noise Reduction in Speech Applications provides a comprehensive introduction to modern techniques for removing or reducing background noise from a range of speech-related applications. Self-contained, it starts with a tutorial-style chapter of background material, then focuses on system aspects, digital algorithms, and implementation. The final section explores a variety of applications and demonstrates to potential users of the technology the results possible with the noise reduction techniques presented. The book offers chapters contributed by international experts, a practical, systems approach, and numerous references. For electrical, acoustics, signal processing, communications, and bioengineers, Noise Reduction in Speech Applications is a valuable resource that shows you how to decide whether noise reduction will solve problems in your own systems and how to make the best use of the technologies available.

Noise is everywhere and in most applications that are related to audio and speech, such as human-machine interfaces, hands-free communications, voice over IP (VoIP), hearing aids, teleconferencing/telepresence/telecollaboration systems, and so many others, the signal of interest (usually speech) that is picked up by a microphone is generally contaminated by noise. As a result, the microphone signal has to be cleaned up with digital signal processing tools before it is stored, analyzed, transmitted, or played out. This cleaning process is often called noise reduction and this topic has attracted a considerable amount of research and engineering attention for several decades. One of the objectives of this book is to present in a common framework an overview of the state of the art of noise reduction algorithms in the single-channel (one microphone) case. The focus is on the most useful approaches, i.e., filtering techniques (in different domains) and spectral enhancement methods. The other objective of Noise Reduction in Speech Processing is to derive all these well-known techniques in a rigorous way and prove many fundamental and intuitive results often taken for granted. This book is especially written for graduate students and research engineers who work on noise reduction for speech and audio applications and want to understand the subtle mechanisms behind each approach. Many new and interesting concepts are presented in this text that we hope the readers will find useful and inspiring.

Outlines the significant advances that have been made during the last decade in the field of discrete Fourier transform domain-based single-channel noise reduction for speech enhancement. Furthermore, the book provides a concise description of a state-of-the-art speech enhancement system, and demonstrates the relative importance of the various building blocks of such a system.

Intelligent Speech Signal Processing investigates the utilization of speech analytics across several systems and real-world activities, including sharing data analytics, creating collaboration networks between several participants, and implementing video-conferencing in different application areas. Chapters focus on the latest applications of speech data analysis and management tools across different recording systems. The book emphasizes the multidisciplinary nature of the field, presenting different applications and challenges with extensive studies on the design, development and management of intelligent systems, neural networks and related machine learning techniques for speech signal processing.

We live in a noisy world! In all applications (telecommunications, hands-free communications, recording, human-machine interfaces, etc.) that require at least one microphone, the signal of interest is usually contaminated by noise and reverberation. As a result, the microphone signal has to be "cleaned" with digital signal processing tools before it is played out, transmitted, or stored. This book is about speech enhancement. Different well-known and state-of-the-art methods for noise reduction, with one or multiple microphones, are discussed. By speech enhancement, we mean not only noise reduction but also dereverberation and separation of independent signals. These topics are also covered in this book. However, the general emphasis is on noise reduction because of the large number of applications that can benefit from this technology. The goal of this book is to provide a strong reference for researchers, engineers, and graduate students who are interested in the problem of signal and speech enhancement. To do so, we invited well-known experts to contribute chapters covering the state of the art in this focused field. TOC:Introduction.- Study of the Wiener Filter for Noise Reduction.- Statistical Methods for the Enhancement of Noisy Speech.- Single- und Multi-Microphone Spectral Amplitude Estimation Using a Super-Gaussian Speech Model.- From Volatility Modeling of Financial Time-Series to Stochastic Modeling and Enhancement of Speech Signals.- Single-Microphone Noise Suppression for 3G Handsets Based on Weighted Noise Estimation.- Signal Subspace Techniques for Speech Enhancement.- Speech Enhancement: Application of the Kalman Filter in the Estimate-Maximize (EM) Framework.- Speech Distortion Weighted Multichannel Wiener Filtering Techniques for Noise Reduction.- Adpative Microphone Arrays Employing Spatial Quadratic Soft Constraints and Spectral Shaping.- Single-Microphone Blind Dereverberation.- Separation and Dereverberation of Speech Signals with Multiple Microphones.- Frequency-Domain Blind Source Separation.- Subband Based Blind Source Separation.- Real-Time Blind Source Separation for Moving Speech Signals.- Separation of Speech by Computational Auditory Scene Analysis

A young man begins a journey from Saudi Arabia, believing it will end with his death in England. If his mission succeeds, he will go to his god a martyr - and many innocents will die with him. For David Banks, an armed protection officer, charged with neutralizing the threat to London's safety, his role is no longer clear-cut: one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter: dangerous distinctions to a police officer with his finger on the trigger. Soon the two men's paths will cross. Before then, their commitment will be shaken by the journeys that take them there. The suicide bomber and the policeman will have cause to question the roads they've chosen. Win or lose, neither will be the same again...

This book treats important topics in "Acoustic Echo and Noise Control" and reports the latest developments. Methods for enhancing the quality of transmitted speech signals are gaining growing attention in universities and in industrial development laboratories. This book, written by an international team of highly qualified experts, concentrates on the modern and advanced methods.