Overlap-Add Windows with Maximum Energy Concentration for Speech and Audio Processing

Abstract: Processing of speech and audio signals with time-frequency representations require windowing methods which allow perfect reconstruction of the original signal and where processing artifacts have a predictable behavior. The most common approach for this purpose is overlap-add windowing, where signal segments are windowed before and after processing. Commonly used windows include the half-sine and a Kaiser-Bessel derived window. The latter is an approximation of the discrete prolate spherical sequence, and thus a maximum energy concentration window, adapted for overlap-add. We demonstrate that performance can be improved by including the overlap-add structure as a constraint in optimization of the maximum energy concentration criteria. The same approach can be used to find further special cases such as optimal low-overlap windows. Our experiments demonstrate that the proposed windows provide notable improvements in terms of reduction in side-lobe magnitude.