Improving bone-conducted speech quality: a novel approach based on speech production principles

Bone conduction microphone (BCM) which records speech that travels through at least one human tissue, demonstrates a significant advantage in capturing voice in noisy environments. The ergonomic design and versatile placement options of BCMs further enhance their utility, allowing integration with various head equipment such as earplugs, glasses, helmets, or NRBC masks. Despite these advantages, ensuring the quality and intelligibility of recorded speech remains a challenge. Past efforts have involved various post-treatments uniformly applied to all signals, to address these drawbacks, with limited success. In this paper, we introduce a novel approach aimed at enhancing BC speech quality by implementing a select number of filters grounded in speech production principles. In this study, treatments both dependent and independent of phonemes are applied. Subjective tests are conducted to assess the efficacy of these filters and compare their effects.