Speech Quality Enhancement for In-Ear Microphone Based on Neural Network

Abstract

Speech captured by an in-ear microphone placed inside an occluded ear has a high signal-to-noise ratio; however, it has different sound characteristics compared to normal speech captured through air conduction. In this study, a method for blind speech quality enhancement is proposed that can convert speech captured by an in-ear microphone to one that resembles normal speech. The proposed method estimates an input-dependent enhancement function by using a neural network in the feature domain and enhances the captured speech via time-domain filtering. Subjective and objective evaluations confirm that the speech enhanced using our proposed method sounds more similar to normal speech than that enhanced using conventional equalizer-based methods.