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.