In-Ear Microphone Hybrid Speech Enhancement

This paper presents a novel speech enhancement approach for performing noise reduction in severely disturbed environments. A small microphone for communication purposes is placed inside the external auditory canal to pick up the speech signal originating from the speech production organ. The speech enhancement is achieved by using three different noise reduction methods: High frequencies are attenuated by passive absorbers, low frequency components are attenuated by employing active noise control and finally a broadband noise reduction is achieved by using spectral subtraction