Energy-based VAD with grey magnitude spectral subtraction

In this paper, we propose a novel voice activity detection (VAD) scheme for low SNR conditions with additive white noise. The proposed approach consists of two parts. First, a grey magnitude spectral subtraction (GMSS) is applied to remove additive noise from a given noisy speech. By this doing, an estimated clean speech is obtained. Second, the enhanced speech by the GMSS is segmented and put into an energy-based VAD to determine whether it is a speech or non-speech segment. The approach presented in this paper is called the GMSS/EVAD. Simulation results indicate that the proposed GMSS/EVAD outperforms VAD in G.729 and GSM AMR for the given low SNR examples. To investigate the performance of the GMSS/EVAD for real-life background noises, the babble and volvo noises in the NOISEX-92 database are under consideration. The simulation results for the given examples indicate that the GMSS/EVAD is able to handle appropriately for the cases of the babble noise with the SNR above 10 dB and the cases of the volvo noise with SNR 15 dB and up.