Single microphone wind noise PSD estimation using signal centroids

Abstract

This contribution presents an efficient technique for the enhancement of speech signals disturbed by wind noise. In almost all noise reduction systems an estimate of the current noise power spectral density (PSD) is required. As common methods for background noise estimation fail due to the non-stationary characteristics of wind noise signals, special algorithms are required. The proposed estimation technique consists of three steps: a feature extraction followed by a wind noise detection and the calculation of the current wind noise PSD. For all steps we exploit the different spectral energy distributions of speech and wind noise. In this context, the so-called signal centroids are introduced. Investigations with measured audio data show that our method can cope with the non-stationary characteristics and enables a sufficient reduction of wind noise. In contrast to other wind noise reduction schemes the proposed algorithm has low complexity and low memory consumption.