Headphone Array Processing for Voice Clarity in Noise
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Solution Overview
Problem
Existing headphone systems fail to effectively isolate and enhance a user's voice in noisy environments, leading to poor performance in applications like voice recognition and communications.
Innovation Solution
The implementation of a method and system that uses multiple microphones and array processing techniques to steer beams and nulls, generating primary and reference signals, which are then filtered to isolate and enhance the user's voice signal, reducing background noise and other acoustic components.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Measurement precision
If multiple microphones and array processing techniques are used to isolate and enhance user's voice, then voice clarity in noisy environments is improved, but device complexity increases
Solution Approach 1:
The system divides the audio processing task into multiple stages: first capturing signals from multiple microphones, then performing array processing to separate voice from noise, and finally applying filtering to enhance the voice signal. This segmentation allows complex processing to be broken down into manageable steps that can be implemented in a headphone system
Solution Approach 2:
The patent introduces intermediate signals (primary signal and reference signal) that serve as mediators between the raw microphone inputs and the final enhanced voice output. These intermediate representations allow the system to process and separate voice and noise components more effectively before producing the final output
2Reliability
If array processing is used to steer beams and nulls to separate voice from noise, then noise reduction performance is improved, but computational requirements increase
Solution Approach 1:
The system performs preliminary array processing to create steered beam signals and null signals before the final filtering stage. By pre-processing the signals to separate voice and noise components, the subsequent filtering operation becomes more efficient and requires less computational energy to achieve the desired noise reduction
Data Source
AI summary
A headphone, headphone system, and speech enhancing method is provided to enhance speech pick-up from the user of a headphone and includes receiving a plurality of signals from a set of microphones and generating a primary signal by array processing the microphone signals to steer a beam toward the user's mouth. A noise reference signal is also derived from one or more microphones via a delay-and-sum technique, and a voice estimate signal is generated by filtering the primary signal to remove components that are correlated to the noise reference signal.