A Two-Step Adaptive Noise Cancellation System for Dental-Drill Noise Reduction

Abstract

This paper introduces a two-step dental-drill Noise Reduction (NR) technique based upon the Adaptive Noise Cancellation (ANC) system. The proposed technique is particularly designed for the NR headphone, which the patients should be wearing while having their dental treatment. In the first step, a tone-frequency extraction algorithm is proposed to estimate the main sinusoidal frequency of the dental-drill noise. The estimated sinusoidal signal is therefore removed significantly from the dental-drill noise by the use of the ANC system. Then, by using another ANC system and a high-pass filter in the second step, the residual high-frequency components of the dental-drill noise are eliminated sufficiently. Computer simulations based on recorded dental-drill sounds and real speech signals demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed two-step ANC system for dental-drill noise reduction, both in terms of the noise attenuation performance and the speech quality of the enhanced speech signal, as compared to the conventional two-microphone ANC system under ideal situation. Moreover, results of a subjective listening test with 15 listeners are also given to guarantee satisfied speech quality of the enhanced speech signal employing the proposed two-step dental-drill NR technique.