Development of acoustic denoising learning network for communication enhancement in construction sites

Abstract

This paper presents a novel denoising approach based on deep learning and signal processing to improve communication efficiency. Construction activities take place when different trades come to the site for overlapped periods to perform their works, which may easily produce hazardous noise levels. The existence of noise affects workers' health issues, especially hearing and rhythm of the heart, and impacts communication efficiency between workers. The proposed approach employs signal processing technique to transform the noisy audio into image and utilize neural networks to extract noisy features and denoise the image. The denoised image is then converted to obtain the denoised audio. Experiments on reducing the side effect of several common noises in construction sites were conducted, compared with the performance of denoising using conventional wavelet transform. Standard objective measures, such as signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), and subjective measures, such as listening tests are used for evaluations. Our experimental results show that the proposed algorithm achieved significant improvements over the traditional method, as evidenced by the following quantitative results of median value: MSE of 0.002, RMSE of 0.049, SNR of 5.7 dB, PSNR of 25.8 dB, and SSR of 8.Results indicate that the proposed algorithm outperforms conventional denoising methods in terms of both objective and subjective evaluation metrics and have the potential to facilitate communication between site workers when facing different noise sources inevitably.