Noise reduction with less processing delay for analysis and synthesis using a single microphone
Sumitaka Sakauchi, Yoichi Haneda, Akitoshi Kataoka · Electronics and Communications in Japan (Part III Fundamental Electronic Science) · 2005
To realize comfortable voice communication with reduced steady ambient noise such as air conditioning noise, there is a form of noise suppression processing based on short-time spectral amplitude estimation. This is a frequency domain process using one microphone. Since the amount of processing is rather small, this is an extremely useful method for realization of equipment and applications. However, the processing delay associated with frame processing in the frequency domain causes deterioration of the voice communications quality. To deal with this problem, the present research proposes a scheme to reduce the processing delay. In the proposed system, deterioration of the processing quality is prevented by retaining the frequency resolution and the processing delay is reduced by compressing the shift width of the processing frame by performing overlap-addition. Objective evaluation confirms that the processing delay can be reduced to one-eighth while retaining a noise suppression capability similar to that in the conventional method. A subjective evaluation experiment confirms that voice quality similar to that in the usual method is attained. © 2005 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Electron Comm Jpn Pt 3, 89(2): 24–32, 2006; Published online in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com). DOI 10.1002/ecjc.20168