Patent ID: 8682658
Filing Date: 2014-03-25
Classification: G10L

Abstract:
1. Audio equipment, comprising: a set of two microphone sensors suitable for picking up the speech of the user of the equipment and for delivering respective noisy speech signals; sampling means for sampling the speech signals delivered by the microphone sensors; and de-noising means for de-noising a speech signal, the de-noising means receiving as input the samples of the speech signals delivered by the two microphone sensors and delivering as output a de-noised speech signal representative of the speech uttered by the user of the equipment; wherein: the de-noising means are non-frequency noise reduction means comprising an adaptive filter combiner for combining the signals delivered by the two microphone sensors, operating by iterative searching seeking to cancel the noise picked up by one of the microphone sensors on the basis of a noise reference given by the signal delivered by the other microphone sensor; the adaptive filter is a fractional delay filter suitable for modeling a delay shorter than the sampling period of the sampling means; the equipment further includes voice activity detector means suitable for delivering a signal representative of the presence or the absence of speech from the user of the equipment; and the adaptive filter also receives as input the speech present or absent signal so as to act selectively: i) either to perform an adaptive search for filter parameters in the absence of speech; ii) or else to “freeze” those parameters of the filter in the presence of speech.