Method and apparatus for suppressing wind noise

摘要

The invention includes a method, apparatus, and computer program to selectively suppress wind noise while preserving narrow-band signals in acoustic data. Sound from one or several microphones is digitized into binary data. A time-frequency transform is applied to the data to produce a series of spectra. The spectra are analyzed to detect the presence of wind noise and narrow band signals. Wind noise is selectively suppressed while preserving the narrow band signals. The narrow band signal is interpolated through the times and frequencies when it is masked by the wind noise. A time series is then synthesized from the signal spectral estimate that can be listened to. This invention overcomes prior art limitations that require more than one microphone and an independent measurement of wind speed. Its application results in good-quality speech from data severely degraded by wind noise.

主权项

1. A method for attenuating noise in a signal detected by a sound detector, comprising:
converting the signal detected by the sound detector into a set of digital samples representing a single channel of acoustic data associated with a single microphone; storing the set of digital samples in a data storage device; performing a time-frequency transform on the set of digital samples to obtain transformed data; performing signal analysis on the transformed data, by a hardware processor, to identify wind noise in the transformed data, where the step of performing the signal analysis comprises:
measuring one or more characteristics of the transformed data by the hardware processor by identifying signal segments of the signal that lack a time-varying quasi-periodic amplitude and phase and designating those signal segments as wind noise associated with wind striking a portion of the sound detector; anddiscriminating between the wind noise and a signal of interest in the transformed data by comparing the harmonic structure of the signal segments of the signal to the harmonic structure of other signal segments of the signal that have a time varying periodic amplitude and a phase modulated sinusoid characteristic by the hardware processor; and attenuating at least a portion of the wind noise identified in the transformed data at frequencies dominated by wind noise; where the discriminating between the wind noise and the signal of interest occurs on the output of the single microphone that sources the single channel of the acoustic data.