Patent ID: 8189722

Claim:
A method, carried out by an electronic computer, for denoising a noisy signal, received through a noise-introducing channel, to produce a recovered signal, encoded in a non-transitory computer-readable medium, that more closely resembles an initially transmitted clean signal than the noisy signal, the method comprising: determining, by the electronic computer, symbol-transition probabilities for the noise-introducing channel; determining, by the electronic computer, a measure of distortion produced with respect to the clean signal by substituting a given replacement symbol for a given clean symbol; counting, by the electronic computer, occurrences of metasymbols in the noisy signal; replacing, by the electronic computer, symbols in the noisy signal by replacement symbols in the recovered signal that provide a smallest estimated distortion with respect to the clean signal, the distortion estimated for a given symbol replacement based on the determined symbol-transition probabilities, the determined measure of distortion, and a blending of occurrence counts of a related family of metasymbols in the noisy signal; and encoding, by the electronic computer, the recovered signal in the non-transitory computer-readable medium.