Intelligibility enhancement for noisy whispered speech using asymmetric cost function

We proposed two whispered speech enhancement methods based on asymmetric cost functions in this paper to deal with the amplification and attenuation distortions of whispered speech distinctively.The modified Itakura-Saito(MIS)distance function provides more penalties to speech amplification distortion,whereas the Kullback-Leibler(KL)divergence function gives more penalties to speech attenuation distortion.The experimental results show that the MIS function based method achieves significant improvement of intelligibility in contrast to the conventional speech enhancement algorithms when the signal-to-noise ratio(SNR)falls below-6 dB,whereas the KL function based one achieves the similar result as the minimum mean square error(MMSE)speech enhancement method.The results show that the effects of the amplification and attenuation distortions on the intelligibility of the enhanced whisper are different,where larger attenuation distortion may result in better intelligibility of speech with low SNR.However,the attenuation distortion has small effects on intelligibility of speech with high SNR.