Speech enhancement software adds noise suppression to DSPs

1st April 2015

Barney Scott

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Cadence Design Systems and Accusonus have jointly announced that the Accusonus Focus-MDR and Focus-DNR speech enhancement software has been ported to and optimised for Cadence's Tensilica HiFi Audio/Voice DSPs. The Accusonus software provides the first integrated solution for reverberation and noise supression, suitable for challenging indoor acoustic environments.

In an indoor environment, the user’s voice travels directly to the device microphones, but also bounces off walls and surfaces and is reflected back to the microphones. This phenomenon is known as reverberation and has a detrimental effect on speech quality, intelligibility and ASR performance. Reverberation becomes more prominent as the user-to-device distance grows and studies showthat ASR performance drops dramatically for distances longer than 1-2m.

The Focus-MDR and Focus-DNR speech enhancement products offer a single- or multi-microphone approach to suppression of reverberation, as well as direct and ambient noise. Because they are flexible to handle various microphone configurations, the products are well-suited for smartphones, tablets, and laptops.

Tensilica HiFi Audio/Voice DSPs are the most widely used and licensable audio/voice DSP IP family, with support for over 140 proven audio/voice software packages and over 70 partners.

“Our software provides speech quality improvement for far-field use cases, when there’s a longer distance between the user and the device. System designers can take advantage of our patent-pending reverberation and ambient noise suppression solution that utilises multi-microphone configurations and integrates principles of DSP, room acoustics and psychoacoustics,” stated Elias Kokkinis, CTO, Accusonus. “Porting to the Tensilica HiFi Audio/Voice DSP made sense because of high customer demand and its highly optimised architecture geared towards more efficient execution of audio and voice codecs and pre- and post-processing modules.”

“Accusonus has a unique and compelling solution for the problem of room reflections and reverberation that improves the voice experience quality of mobile devices,” said Larry Przywara, Group Director of Audio/Voice IP Marketing, Cadence. “By collaborating, Accusonus and Cadence can offer our mutual customers the Focus speech enhancement software optimised for the HiFi DSP architecture, plus the advantage of a significantly lower frequency enabling lower power compared to other architectures.”