Acoustic object canceller: removing a known signal from monaural recording using blind synchronization

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a technique for removing a specific type of interference from a monaural recording. Nonstationary interferences are generally challenging to eliminate from such recordings. However, if the interference is a known sound like a cell phone ringtone, music from a CD or streaming service, or a radio or TV broadcast, its source signal can be easily obtained. In our method, we define such interference as an acoustic object. Even if the sampling frequencies of the recording and the acoustic object do not match, we compensate for the mismatch and use the maximum likelihood estimation technique with the auxiliary function to remove the interference from the recording. We compare several probabilistic models for representing the object-canceled signal. Experimental evaluations confirm the effectiveness of our proposed method.