Digital processing of speech signals

Apparatus for reducing acoustic background noise for use with a telephone handset (10) or a boom microphone device (100) or a boom headset (401) or the like. The apparatus includes first (12) and second (14) microphones which are arranged such that the first microphone (12) receives a desired speech input and the background noise present in the vicinity of the speech, and the second microphone (14) receives substantially only the background noise. The background noise from the second microphone (14) is converted into a corresponding electrical signal and substracted (16) from a signal corresponding to the speech and background noise obtained from the first microphone (12) so as to produce a signal representing substantially the speech.

Noise cancellation apparatus

The problem of acoustic noise is becoming increasingly serious with the growing use of industrial and medical equipment, appliances, and consumer electronics. Active noise control (ANC), based on the principle of superposition, was developed in the early 20th century to help reduce noise. However, ANC is still not widely used owing to the effectiveness of control algorithms, and to the physical and economical constraints of practical applications. In this paper, we briefly introduce some fundamental ANC algorithms and theoretical analyses, and focus on recent advances on signal processing algorithms, implementation techniques, challenges for innovative applications, and open issues for further research and development of ANC systems.

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Recent Advances on Active Noise Control: Open Issues and Innovative Applications

A personal communications system is described which includes components of software and hardware operating in conjunction with a personal computer. The user interface control software operates on a personal computer, preferably within the Microsoft Windows® environment. The software control system communicates with hardware components linked to the software through the personal computer serial communications port. The hardware components include telephone communication equipment, digital signal processors, and hardware to enable voice, fax and data communication with a remote site connected through a standard telephone line. The functions of the hardware components are controlled by control software operating within the hardware component and from the software components operating within the personal computer. The major functions of the system are a telephone function, a voice mail function, a fax manager function, a multi-media mail function, a show and tell function, a terminal function and an address book function. The telephone function allows the present system to operate, from the users perspective, as a conventional telephone using either hands-free, headset or handset operation. The telephone function is more sophisticated than a standard telephone in that the present system converts the voice into a digital signal which can be processed with echo cancellation, compressed, stored as digital data for later retrieval and transmitted as digital voice data concurrent with the transfer of digital information data.

Computer-based multifunction personal communications system.

Interest in 3D video applications and systems is growing rapidly and technology is maturating. It is expected that multiview autostereoscopic displays will play an important role in home user environments, since they support multiuser 3D sensation and motion parallax impression. The tremendous data rate cannot be handled efficiently by representation and coding formats such as MVC or MPEG-C Part 3. Multiview video plus depth (MVD) is a new format that efficiently supports such advanced 3DV systems, but this requires high-quality intermediate view synthesis. For this, a new approach is presented that separates unreliable image regions along depth discontinuities from reliable image regions, which are treated separately and fused to the final interpolated view. In contrast to previous layered approaches, our algorithm uses two boundary layers and one reliable layer, performs image-based 3D warping only, and was generically implemented, that is, does not necessarily rely on 3D graphics support. Furthermore, different hole-filling and filtering methods are added to provide high-quality intermediate views. As a result, high-quality intermediate views for an existing 9-view auto-stereoscopic display as well as other stereo- and multiscopic displays are presented, which prove the suitability of our approach for advanced 3DV systems.

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View Synthesis for Advanced 3D Video Systems

An active noise control apparatus for transmitting, from a loud speaker, a secondary noise synthesized so as to have the same amplitude as and the opposite phase to a primary noise and for canceling the noise by acoustically overlapping the secondary noise. An overall system filter for simulating a characteristic of an overall system leading to an error detecting microphone from a noise detecting microphone is provided for the first and the second overall system filter. A second and a first noise control filter are connected to the first and the second overall system filter in cascade to form a noise control filter. A coefficient of an estimating noise transfer system filter, obtained when the difference between the differential output of both obtained when a white noise is applied to the circuit of cascade connections and the response difference of the first and the second overall system filter from a differential overall system filter becomes a minimum, is made the coefficient of the noise control filter.

Active noise control apparatus

ADAPTIVE DIGITAL FILTER INCLUDING LOW-PASS FILTER ABSTRACT OF THE DISCLOSURE An adaptive digital filter for estimating a response characteristic of a signal path by monitoring a sampled output signal of the signal path, estimating a predetermined number of filter coefficients which represent the response characteristic of the signal path, and generating an estimated output signal of the signal path using a plurality of successive sampled input signals of the signal path and the estimated filter coefficients, where the estimation is carried out so that a difference between the output signal and the estimated output signal is reduced. Each of the filter coefficients is extracted by a low-pass filter where the low-pass filter coefficient in the low-pass filter can be set to a constant. Normalization can be carried out in either the input side or the output side of the low-pass filter. Otherwise, the low-pass filter coefficient may be set to 1-K?Xj(m)2/r, where r is set equal to a norm of the sampled input signals in the beginning, and is then set to an integrated power of the sampled input signals.

Adaptive digital filter including low-pass filter

A noise reduction technique is proposed to reduce wideband and sinusoidal noise in noisy speech. In real environments, the background noise includes sinusoidal noise, for example, from ventilation fans. Therefore, it is also important to reduce sinusoidal noise. The new noise reduction system uses two types of adaptive line enhancer (ALE) and a noise reconstruction filter (NRF). First, two ALEs estimate the speech components. However, since two ALEs cannot estimate unvoiced sound, the quality of the speech enhanced by the two ALEs is not enough. Thus, the NRF is used to improve the noise reduction ability. The NRF accurately estimates the background noise from the signal occupied by the noise components, which is obtained by subtracting the speech enhanced by the two ALEs from the noisy speech. The enhanced speech is obtained by subtracting the reconstructed noise from the noisy speech. Additionally, the noise reduction system with a feedback path is also proposed for more improvement of the quality of the enhanced speech.

A new noise reduction system based on ALE and noise reconstruction filter

An acoustic echo canceler and a side-tone echo canceler provided in a hands-free telephone suppress an acoustic echo and a side-tone echo respectively with few error by providing automatic gain controllers and/or limiters in the hands-free telephone so that the acoustic echo canceler and the side-tone echo canceler operate in linear, and a directional characteristic of a microphone used in the hands-free telephone for reducing the acoustic echo is controlled by a microphone direction controller so that the microphone operates as an omnidirectional microphone when a level of a received signal of the hands-free telephone is less than a designated level and as a bidirectional microphone when the level exceeds the designated level, further gains of an output of the microphone increases in a low frequency range.

Hands-free telephone set

An electronic telephone terminal having a transmitter (1) and a receiver (2), both having an approximately linear acoustic-to-electric transduction characteristics, and having a surrounding noise suppression function, and including a variable attenuator (12) for controlling a gain of a transmission system; a noise detection device (3) for detecting surrounding noise; and a control device (63) for controlling the variable attenuator (12) in such a manner that when a sound pressure level input to the transmitter (1) exceeds a predetermined threshold value, the gain is fixedly set to a constant value, and when the input sound pressure level is equal to or below the predetermined threshold level, the gain is controlled in response to a change in the surrounding noise level detected by the noise detection device (3).

Kensaku Fujii

Papers

Active noise control apparatus

Adaptive digital filter including low-pass filter

A new noise reduction system based on ALE and noise reconstruction filter

Hands-free telephone set

Electronic telephone terminal having noise suppression function