An adaptive noise canceller with low signal distortion for speech codecs

This paper proposes an adaptive noise canceller (ANC) with low signal distortion for speech codecs. The proposed ANC has two adaptive filters: a main filter (MF) and a subfilter (SF). The signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of input signals is estimated using the SF. To reduce signal distortion in the output signal of the ANC, a step size for coefficient update in the MF is controlled according to the estimated SNR. Computer simulation results using speech and diesel engine noise recorded in a special-purpose vehicle show that the proposed ANC reduces signal distortion in the output signal by up to 15 dB compared with a conventional ANC. Results of subjective listening tests show that the mean opinion scores (MOS’s) for the proposed ANC with and without a speech codec are one point higher than the scores for the conventional ANC.