Noise Reduction Combining a General Microphone and a Throat Microphone

Abstract

In this study, we propose a method to reduce noise from speech obtained from a general microphone using the information of a throat microphone. A throat microphone records a sound by detecting the vibration of the skin surface near the throat directly. Therefore, throat microphones are less prone to noise than ordinary microphones. However, as the acoustic characteristics of the throat microphone differ from those of ordinary microphones, its sound quality degrades. To solve this problem, this study aims to improve the speech quality while suppressing the noise of a general microphone by using the information recorded by a throat microphone as reference information to extract the speech signal in general microphones. In this paper, the framework of the proposed method is formulated, and several experiments are conducted to evaluate the noise suppression and speech quality improvement effects of the proposed method.