This book serves as a basic reference for those interested in the application of metaheuristics to speech enhancement. The major goal of the book is to explain the basic concepts of optimization methods and their use in heuristic optimization in speech enhancement to scientists, practicing engineers, and academic researchers in speech processing. The authors discuss why it has been a challenging problem for researchers to develop new enhancement algorithms that aid in the quality and intelligibility of degraded speech. They present powerful optimization methods to speech enhancement that can help to solve the noise reduction problems. Readers will be able to understand the fundamentals of speech processing as well as the optimization techniques, how the speech enhancement algorithms are implemented by utilizing optimization methods, and will be given the tools to develop new algorithms. The authors also provide a comprehensive literature survey regarding the topic.

This book explains speech enhancement in the Fractional Fourier Transform (FRFT) domain and investigates the use of different FRFT algorithms in both single channel and multi-channel enhancement systems, which has proven to be an ideal time frequency analysis tool in many speech signal processing applications. The authors discuss the complexities involved in the highly non- stationary signal processing and the concepts of FRFT for speech enhancement applications. The book explains the fundamentals of FRFT as well as its implementation in speech enhancement. Theories of different FRFT methods are also discussed. The book lets readers understand the new fractional domains to prepare them to develop new algorithms. A comprehensive literature survey regarding the topic is also made available to the reader.