Copyright © 2008 The Institute of Electronics, Information and Communication Engineers
Special Section on Acoustic Scene Analysis and Reproduction - Papers |
A Two-Microphone Noise Reduction Method in Highly Non-stationary Multiple-Noise-Source Environments*
1 The authors are with School of Information Science, Japan Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, Nomi-shi, 923-1292 Japan. E-mail: junfeng{at}jaist.ac.jp; E-mail: akagi{at}jaist.ac.jp, 2 The author is with Research Institute of Electrical Communication, Tohoku University, Sendai-shi, 980-8577 Japan. E-mail: yoh{at}ais.riec.tohoku.ac.jp
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Abstract |
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In this paper, we propose a two-microphone noise reduction method to deal with non-stationary interfering noises in multiple-noise-source environments in which the traditional two-microphone algorithms cannot function well. In the proposed algorithm, multiple interfering noise sources are regarded as one virtually integrated noise source in each subband, and the spectrum of the integrated noise is then estimated using its virtual direction of arrival. To do this, we suggest a direction finder for the integrated noise using only two microphones that performs well even in speech active periods. The noise spectrum estimate is further improved by integrating a single-channel noise estimation approach and then subtracted from that of the noisy signal, finally enhancing the desired target signal. The performance of the proposed algorithm is evaluated and compared with the traditional algorithms in various conditions. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm outperforms the traditional algorithms in various conditions in terms of objective and subjective speech quality measures.
Key Words: noise reduction, non-stationary noise, multiple-noise-source environments, virtually integrated sound source
Manuscript received August 3, 2007. Manuscript revised November 19, 2007.
* Part of this work was done when Junfeng Li was a postdoctoral researcher at Research Institute of Electrical Communication, Tohoku University, Sendai, Japan.