The present paper describes a quality enhancement of speech corrupted by additive background noise in a single channel system. The proposed approach is based on the introduction of a perceptual criteria using a frequency-weighting filter in a subtractive-type enhancement process. Although the subtractive-type method is very attractive because of its simplicity, it produces an unnatural and unpleasant residual noise. Thus, choosing fixed optimized parameters for all speech and noise conditions is difficult. A new and effective algorithm is thus developed based on the masking properties of the human ear. This newly developed algorithm allows for an automatic adaptation in the time and frequency of the enhancement system, and finds a suitable noise estimate according to the frequency of the corrupted speech. Experimental results show that the proposed approach can efficiently remove additive noise related to various types of noise corruption.