Performance analysis of ideal binary masks in speech enhancement

Binary masks are essential elements to be used in monaural speech segregation and hearing aids. The performances of the ideal binary masks in terms of signal to noise ratio were evaluated in this article, and a method to predict it before application was proposed. Within the framework of the computational auditory scene analysis (CASA), Ideal binary mask (IBM) has the optimum performance in time-frequency (T-F) units. It can be used as an object goal in global level, which was confirmed by the experiments on a speech mixture database. Furthermore, energy distribution of the target and interfere signals were used together to estimate the performance of IBM in mixture separation.