Simultaneous noise classification and reduction using a priori learned models

Classifying the acoustic environment is an essential part of a practical supervised source separation algorithm where a model is trained for each source offline. In this paper, we present a classification scheme that is combined with a probabilistic nonnegative matrix factorization (NMF) based speech denoising algorithm. We model the acoustic environment with a hidden Markov model (HMM) whose emission distributions are assumed to be of NMF type. We derive a minimum mean square error (MMSE) estimator of clean speech signal in which the state-dependent speech estimators are weighted according to the state posterior probabilities (or probabilities of different noise environments) and are summed. Our experiments show that the proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art substantially and that its performance is very close to an oracle case where the noise type is known in advance.