SYSTEM AND METHOD FOR NOISE THRESHOLD ADAPTATION FOR VOICE ACTIVITY DETECTION IN NONSTATIONARY NOISE ENVIRONMENTS
The system and method of the invention relates to voice detection technology for determining instants of time at which a snapshot of noise characteristics results in improved adaptation of noise floors used in voice detection. The approach is based on the "lower envelope" of the smoothed input signal power. Incorporation of this approach in a simple time domain VAD (Voice Activity Detector) results in an effective low-complexity system which, on the basis of simulations, gives good performance down to SNR values of about 0dB. In the invention the lower envelope also provides the updated value of the noise threshold during the presence of speech. The invention can also be embedded in other, more complex (e.g., frequency domain) VADs at low computational cost.