Estimating the noise components of a signal during periods of speech activity

An apparatus for estimating the noise component of a sampled signal comprising:

• (a) prefiltering means for prefiltering an input sample set during periods of no speech activity and during periods of speech activity and prior to noise estimation of a signal, the prefiltering means discarding spectral minima in the input sample set that are shorter than a specified duration so as to provide a set of samples prefiltered both during periods of no speech activity and during speech activity for noise estimation, wherein the input sample set includes either samples representing spectral magnitudes of the signal or samples representing short term average magnitude values of the signal;
• (b) a plurality of filtering means each providing an estimate of a minimum sample in the sample set;
• and
• (c) comparing means, coupled to the plurality of filtering means, for successively comparing estimates among the plurality of filtering means, and selecting the signal estimate having the lowest magnitude as a noise component estimate.