Performance evaluation on multi-channel Wiener filter based speech enhancement for unmanned aerial vehicles recordings

Abstract

Recording speech from unmanned aerial vehicles has been attracting interest due to its broad application including filming, search and rescue, and surveillance. One of the challenges in this problem is the quality of the speech recorded due to contamination by various interfering noise. In particular, noise contamination due to those radiated by the unmanned aerial vehicles rotors significantly impacts the overall quality of the audio recordings. Multi-channel Wiener filter has been a commonly used technique for speech enhancement because of its robustness under practical setup. Existing studies have also utilised such techniques in speech enhancement for unmanned aerial vehicle recordings, such as the well-known beamformer with postfiltering framework. However, many variants of the multi-channel Wiener filter have also been developed over recent years such as the speech distortion weighted multi-channel Wiener filter. To address these recent advancements, in this study we compare the performance of these variants of techniques. In particular, we explore the benefits these techniques may bring forth in the setting of audio recordings from an unmanned aerial vehicle.