[Speex-dev] Preprocessor denoise. Does it work?

[Jean-Marc Valin]

Andy Ross a écrit :
> I'm having trouble with the preprocessor's noise reduction feature.
> The basic issue is that it simply doesn't work very well.
> 
> With my laptop (whose microphone is otherwise quite capable) I
> routinely hear transient background noise, typing, and other "quiet"
> sounds leaking through to the speex stream.  Even worse, the AGC
> feature is blowing these things up into just awful explosions and
> whines.

It may sound odd to you, but there's actually no way for the noise
suppressor to know whether you want to keep these sounds or not. The
noise suppressor will only attempt to remove stationary noise, such as
thermal noise, fans, ... The AGC can indeed do strange things in these
cases, but it's been improved in svn (compared to 1.2beta1).

> Honestly, it works so badly that I wonder if I'm doing something
> wrong.  I wrote a trivial squelch feature* in 10 minutes that works
> basically 100% of the time.
> 
> * Zero the sample data if the maximum sample in a frame is less than
>   4% of saturation or 20% of the maximum sample yet seen.  It's about
>   8 lines of code.

Congratulations. If it works better on your data, then use it. It'll
just fail miserably in other conditions, but you may not care about
those. In any case, that's the main difficulty with speech enhancement
because you've got all kinds of noise, and you never know what the mic
recording level is.

> I'm using the 32KHz ultra wide band mode with 16 bit sample data and
> am setting all of AGC, VAD, DEREVERB and DENOISE to 1 using
> speex_preprocess_ctl().  AGC_LEVEL is set to 20000.0.

Are you using a frame size in the 10-20 ms range?

	Jean-Marc