One problem in background estimation is the inherent change in the background such as waving tree branches, water surfaces, camera shakes, and the existence of moving objects in every image. In this paper, a new method for background estimation is proposed based on function approximation in kernel domain. For this purpose, Weighted Kernel-based Learning Algorithm (WKLA) is designed. WKLA includes a weighted type of kernel least mean square algorithm with ability to function approximation in the presence of noise. So, the proposed background estimation method includes two stages: firstly, a novel algorithm for outlier detection namely Fuzzy Outlier Detector (FOD) is applied. Then obtained results are fed to the WKLA. The proposed approach can handle scenes containing moving backgrounds, gradual illumination changes, camera vibrations, and non-empty backgrounds. The qualitative results and quantitative evaluations on various indoor and outdoor sequences relative to existing approaches show the high accuracy and effectiveness of the proposed method in background estimation and foreground detection.
Quality and intelligibility of speech signals are degraded under additive background noise which is a critical problem for hearing aid and cochlear implant users. Motivated to address this problem, we propose a novel speech enhancement approach using a deep spectrum image translation network. To this end, we suggest a new architecture, called VGG19-UNet, where a deep fully convolutional network known as VGG19 is embedded at the encoder part of an image-to-image translation network, i.e. U-Net. Moreover, we propose a perceptuallymodified version of the spectrum image that is represented in Mel frequency and power-law non-linearity amplitude domains, representing good approximations of human auditory perception model. By conducting experiments on a real challenge in speech enhancement, i.e. unseen noise environments, we show that the proposed approach outperforms other enhancement methods in terms of both quality and intelligibility measures, represented by PESQ and ESTOI, respectively.
Keywords-speech enhancement; hearing aid; image-to-image translation; VGG19-UNet; perceptually-modified spectrum image.
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