Semi-supervised speech enhancement combining nonnegative matrix factorization and robust principal component analysis

Nonnegative matrix factorization (NMF) is one of the most popular machine learning tools for speech enhancement. The supervised NMF-based speech enhancement is accomplished by updating iteratively with the prior knowledge of the clean speech and noise spectra bases. However, in many real-world scenarios, it is not always possible for conducting any prior training. The traditional semi-supervised NMF (SNMF) version overcomes this shortcoming while the performance degrades. In this letter, without any prior knowledge of the speech and noise, we present an improved semi-supervised NMF-based speech enhancement algorithm combining techniques of NMF and robust principal component analysis (RPCA). In this approach, fixed speech bases are obtained from the training samples chosen from public dateset offline. The noise samples used for noise bases training, instead of characterizing a priori as usual, can be obtained via RPCA algorithm on the fly. This letter also conducts a study on the assumption whether the time length of the estimated noise samples may have an effect on the performance of the algorithm. Three metrics, including PESQ, SDR and SNR are applied to evaluate the performance of the algorithms by making experiments on TIMIT with 20 noise types at various signal-to-noise ratio levels. Extensive experimental results demonstrate the superiority of the proposed algorithm over the competing speech enhancement algorithm.