A Stereo Wind-Noise Suppressor with Null Beamforming and Frequency-Domain Noise Averaging

This paper proposes a stereo wind-noise suppressor with frequency-domain noise averaging. A directional gain for diffuse wind noise is estimated frame by frame using a null beamformer based on interchannel phase difference which blocks the target signal. The wind-noise gain estimate is commonly multiplied by the input noisy signal to generate channel dependent wind noise estimates in order to cope with interchannel wind-noise imbalance. Interchannel phase agreement by target signal dominance or incidentally equal wind-noise phase, which leads to underestimation, is offset by averaging channel dependent wind-noise estimates along frequency. Evaluation results show that the mean PESQ score by the proposed wind-noise suppressor reaches 2.1 which is 0.2 higher than that by the wind-noise suppressor without averaging and 0.3 higher than that by a conventional monaural-noise suppressor with a statistically significant difference.