Patent ID: 8712762

Claim:
A speech processing apparatus comprising: a filter, of a processor, configured to adjust a spectral envelope of an input speech signal with a frequency dependent adjustment factor; a factor selector for selecting the adjustment factor for respective spectral components each dependent on the input speech signal, the factor selector being configured to select the factor between a first or second non-zero value, the second value being smaller than the first value, when a strength average for the spectral component is above and below a threshold value respectively, whereby a relative strength of different spectral components below the threshold value is preserved; wherein the filter is configured to compute sets of spectral components for a series of time frames and to compute adjusted spectral components, wherein the spectral components have been adjusted by the adjustment factors; wherein the factor selector comprising an averager configured to compute the strength average for the spectral component for each time frame by averaging over a plurality of the time frames adjacent the time frame for which the strength average is computed.