Ego noise reduction for hose-shaped rescue robot combining independent low-rank matrix analysis and multichannel noise cancellation

Abstract

In this paper, we present an ego noise reduction method for a hose-shaped rescue robot, developed for search and rescue operations in large-scale disasters. It is used to search for victims in disaster sites by capturing their voices with its microphone array. However, ego noises are mixed with voices, and it is difficult to differentiate them from a call for help from a disaster victim. To solve this problem, we here propose a two-step noise reduction method involving the following: (1) the estimation of both speech and ego noise signals from observed multichannel signals by multichannel nonnegative matrix factorization (NMF) with the rank-1 spatial constraint, and (2) the application of multichannel noise cancellation to the estimated speech signal using reference signals. Our evaluations show that this approach is effective for suppressing ego noise.