Low-delay nonuniform pseudo-QMF banks with application to speech enhancement

Abstract-This paper presents a method for designing low-delay nonuniform pseudo quadrature mirror filter (QMF) banks. This method is motivated by the work of Li, Nguyen, and Tantaratana, in which the nonuniform filter bank is realized by combining an appropriate number of adjacent sub-bands of a uniform pseudo-QMF bank. In prior work, the prototype filter of the uniform pseudo-QMF bank was constrained to have linear phase and the overall delay associated with the filter bank was often unacceptably large for filter banks with a large number of sub-bands. This paper proposes a pseudo-QMF filter bank design technique that significantly reduces the delay by relaxing the linear phase constraints. An example in which an oversampled critical-band nonuniform filter bank is designed and applied to a two-state modeling speech enhancement system is presented in this paper. Comparison of the performance of this system to competing methods employing tree-structured, linear phase multiresolution analysis indicates that the approach described in this paper strikes a good balance between system performance and low delay.