Noise reduction combining microphones and laser listening devices

This paper describes noise reduction combining microphones and laser listening devices. A microphone array is one of the useful approaches for reducing the noise. However, when the microphones are mounted on robot systems, the problem of internal noise from robots such as motors and gears arises. It is difficult to reduce the internal noise utilizing the conventional microphone array because the noise source is extremely close to the microphones. As the internal noise is not always stationary or sparse, some useful blind source separation (BSS) approaches such as Independent Component Analysis (ICA) and sparseness approach cannot be employed. Our aim is to reduce the internal noise by a sensor fusion of microphones and laser listening devices. In this paper, we describe the problem of the typical microphone array and show the design of the laser listening devices. Noise reduction combining microphones and laser listening devices is then described. Experimental results are also given to show the effectiveness of the proposed method.