Method and device for suppressing background noise in a voice signal and corresponding system with echo cancellation

Claim 1

Method of suppressing a background noise signal in a sampled noisy voice signal, comprising the following steps: digital frequency-domain processing of said noisy voice signal to produce time-domain filtering coefficients, and digital time-domain processing of said noisy voice signal in accordance with said filtering coefficients to produce a voice signal in which said background noise signal is substantially suppressed, the digital frequency-domain processing step for a given processing cycle comprising the steps of: extracting a plurality of frequency-domain energy components in said noisy voice signal by producing K groups, each comprising a plurality of frequency-domain components, for K respective interleaved blocks of said noisy voice signal, where K is an integer, and calculating an energy mean of K frequency-domain components of the same rank in the respective K groups to produce a respective extracted frequency-domain energy component, for each of said extracted frequency-domain energy components, estimating a ratio between an energy level of said noisy voice signal and an energy level of said background noise signal, determining a respective gain for each extracted frequency-domain energy component according to said estimated ratio between the energy level of said noisy voice signal and the energy level of said background noise signal for each selected frequency-domain component, and; synthesizing said filtering coefficients in accordance with said gains.