Method for Enhancing Audio Signal using Phase Information

• US 20160111108A1
• Filed: 02/12/2015
• Published: 04/21/2016
• Est. Priority Date: 10/21/2014
• Status: Active Grant

• Current Assignee: Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories, Inc. (Mitsubishi Electric Corporation)
• Original Assignee: Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories, Inc. (Mitsubishi Electric Corporation)
• Inventors: Erdogan, Hakan, Hershey, John, Watanabe, Shinji, Le Roux, Jonathan
• Granted Patent: US 9,881,631 B2
• Time in Patent Office: Days
• US Class Current: 1/1
• CPC Class Codes: G10L 21/0208 Noise filtering
• CPC Class Codes: G10L 21/0216 characterised by the method used for estimating noise
• CPC Class Codes: G10L 21/0324 Details of processing therefor
• CPC Class Codes: G10L 25/03 characterised by the type of extracted parameters
• CPC Class Codes: G10L 25/30 using neural networks

Abstract

A method transforms a noisy audio signal to an enhanced audio signal, by first acquiring the noisy audio signal from an environment. The noisy audio signal is processed by an enhancement network having network parameters to jointly produce a magnitude mask and a phase estimate. Then, the magnitude mask and the phase estimate are used to obtain the enhanced audio signal.

Claims

1. A method for transforming a noisy audio signal to an enhanced audio signal, comprising steps:

acquiring the noisy audio signal from an environment;

processing the noisy audio signal by an enhancement network having network parameters to jointly produce a magnitude mask and a phase estimate;

using the magnitude mask and the phase estimate to obtain the enhanced audio signal, wherein the steps are performed in a processor.

2. The method of claim 1, wherein the enhancement network is a bidirectional long short-term memory (BLSTM) deep recurrent neural network (DRNN).

3. The method of claim 1, wherein the enhancement network uses a phase-sensitive objective function based on an error in a complex spectrum that includes an error in amplitude and the phase of the noisy audio signal.

4. The method of claim 1, wherein the phase estimate is obtained directly through the enhancement network.

5. The method of claim 1, wherein the phase estimate is jointly obtained with an amplitude of the noisy audio signal using a complex valued mask.