Mitigating wind induced noise in outdoor microphone signals using a singular spectral subspace method

Eldwaik, O; Li, FF

Abstract

Wind induced noise is one of the major concerns of outdoor acoustic signal acquisition. It affects many field measurement and audio recording scenarios. Filtering such noise is known to be
difficult due to its broadband and time varying nature. In this paper, a new method to mitigate wind induced noise in microphone signals is developed. Instead of applying filtering techniques, wind induced noise is statistically separated from wanted signals in a singular spectral subspace. The paper is presented in the context of handling microphone signals acquired outdoor for acoustic sensing and environmental noise monitoring or soundscapes sampling. The method includes two complementary stages, namely decomposition and reconstruction. The first stage decomposes mixed signals in
eigen-subspaces, selects and groups the principal components according to their contributions to wind noise and wanted signals in the singular spectrum domain. The second stage reconstructs the
signals in the time domain, resulting in the separation of wind noise and wanted signals. Results show that microphone wind noise is separable in the singular spectrum domain evidenced by the weighted correlation. The new method might be generalized to other outdoor sound acquisition applications.


Keywords: microphone; wind noise; matrix decomposition and reconstruction; separability; weighted correlation; acoustic sensing; acoustic signals; environmental noise; monitoring

Citation

Eldwaik, O., & Li, F. (2018). Mitigating wind induced noise in outdoor microphone signals using a singular spectral subspace method. Technologies, 6(1), https://doi.org/10.3390/technologies6010019

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Acceptance Date: Jan 25, 2018
• Publication Date: Jan 28, 2018
• Deposit Date: Feb 5, 2018
• Publicly Available Date: Feb 5, 2018
• Journal: Technologies
• Publisher: MDPI
• Volume: 6
• Issue: 1
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.3390/technologies6010019
• Publisher URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/technologies6010019
• Related Public URLs: http://www.mdpi.com/journal/technologies
• Additional Information: Additional Information : Most recently the authors have published two previous papers regarding the use of the SSA method to address microphone wind noise problem in outdoor acoustic data acquisition. The method has been explored with different data sets and scope . This paper further develops the work to give a complete treatment of the method taking into account the separation capability assessment.