Enhancement of Voice Intelligibility for Mobile Speech Communication in Noisy Environments

One of the biggest challenges still encounter with speech communication via a mobile phone is that it is sometimes very difficult to understand what is said when listening in a noisy place. In this paper a novel approach based on two models is introduced to increase speech intelligibility for a listener surrounded by environmental noise. One is to perceptually optimize the speech when considering simultaneous background noise, the other is to modify the speech towards a more intelligible, naturally elicited speaking style. The two models are combined to provide more understandable speech even in a loud noisy environment environment, even in the case where we are unable to increase the speech volume. The improvements in perceptual quality and intelligibility are shown by Perceptual Objective Listening Quality Assessment and Listening Effort Mean Opinion Score evaluation.