RNNoise: Learning Noise Suppression

[jmvalin]

This demo presents the RNNoise project, showing how deep learning can be applied to noise suppression. The main idea is to combine classic signal processing with deep learning to create a real-time noise suppression algorithm that's small and fast. No expensive GPUs required — it runs easily on a Raspberry Pi. The result is much simpler (easier to tune) and sounds better than traditional noise suppression systems (been there!).

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Comments

Fab!

[(Anonymous)]

This is great, thanks for your work! Do you think this might be of use with non-audio data?

Re: Fab!

[(Anonymous)]

Hi this looks really interesting. I am working with a team to try to improve optical character recognition on old and "noisy" text images that humans can read but OCR cannot. We have been using neural net to do this with some success on training data (https://github.com/digiah/oldOCR, my github username is rcrath) using OCRopy but I have always thought treating the text as a data stream and using department to get a noise sample of the garbage text that OCR makes when it fails and subtracting that from the signal might reduce the garbage in an OCR file to make other approaches better focused. I realize that is far from what you are doing, butdo you think it would be feasible for us to try and adapt your code?

One thing that strikes my ear in the samples, most obviously in the street noise one, is that the algorithm is acting more like a gate than noise removal since the horns and traffic are clearly audible still in the speech sections.

I would love to see this adapted to guitar noise suppression!

Thanks for this work.

Re: Fab!

[(Anonymous)]

Lol, plz excuse autocorrect. I have no idea what "department" was supposed to be!

Re: Fab!

[jmvalin]

So I don't think my code would be applicable to OCR. It seems like what you would want instead of to train your OCR with these noisy images. If you don't have enough, you could try and simulate that noise (though it has to be realistic).

About your "noise gate" comment, I understand why you say it sounds like that, but I can assure you it also cancels during active speech. The only reason it cannot easily cancel the horns on active speech is because it cannot use lookahead to tell the horns from speech. It's easy to do when you have a second of audio, but not if all you have is 10 ms.

Re: Fab!

[(Anonymous)]

How easy would it be to increase the lookahead for non-realtime applications (e.g. noise reduction in Audacity)? Just increase a constant in the source code? Or would it require retraining the RNN?