Tarun, you have two options: (1) get rid of the ground loop that is
quite probably the culprit, or (2) move to Europe where the 60-Hz hum
is unknown.
-Pierre
On 6/16/09 7:43 AM, "Tarun Pruthi" <t.pruthi@xxxxxxxx> wrote:
Hi all:
I have been having a lot of problems lately with 60 Hz humming
noise in my speech recordings (I will confess that most of my
tests have been on windows/linux laptops - and my guess is that
they probably have much worse recording quality than desktops on
average - but we live in a mobile world now and I have to make it
work on laptops). Whenever it is there, it causes a serious drop
in speech recognition accuracy, especially since it comes in very
randomly at times giving for example clean recordings during
speaker enrollment and noisy recordings in live testing. The
problem is even worse on linux which has given me all kinds of
artifacts in the recordings besides the 60 Hz hum - my guess is
that this is most likely because of driver problems.
So, I have 3 questions:
1. What is the source of this 60 Hz noise? Powerline? RF
interference? I have tried disconnecting the power cord - it works
sometimes, but not always.
2. Is there a standard way to get rid of the 60 Hz hum and ensure
clean recordings for the purposes of speech recognition? The only
way I can think of is to use notch filters at 60 Hz, and some of
the harmonics, say 120 Hz and 180 Hz, since most of the times it
doesn't manifest as a single tone at 60 Hz, but has harmonics all
over the frequency range.
3. If this is a well-known problem with sound cards, then why
aren't we, speech recognition community, trying to come up with a
mandatory compliance standard for sound card manufacterers which
ensures that the microphone input is not corrupted by 60/50 Hz
noise? That should provide a big boost to speech recognition
accuracies, and a wider acceptance of speech recognition.
Tarun
Senior Research Engineer
Think A Move, Ltd