Non-stationary noise removal from repeated sweep measurements

Abstract

Acoustic measurements using sine sweeps are prone to background noise and non-stationary disturbances. Repeated measurements can be averaged to improve the resulting signal-to-noise ratio. However, averaging leads to poor rejection of non-stationary high-energy disturbances and, in the case of a time-variant environment, causes attenuation at high frequencies. This paper proposes a robust method to combine repeated sweep measurements using across-measurement median filtering in the time-frequency domain. The method, called Mosaic, successfully rejects non-stationary noise, suppresses background noise, and is more robust toward time variation than averaging. The proposed method allows high-quality measurement of impulse responses in a noisy environment.