Graphics and Media Lab

Spectral attenuation algorithms for audio noise reduction often generate annoying musical noise artifacts. Most existing methods for suppression of musical noise employ a combination of instantaneous and time-smoothed spectral estimates for calculation of spectral gains. In this paper a 2-D approach to the filtering of a time-frequency spectrum is proposed, based on a recently developed non-local means image denoising algorithm. The proposed algorithm demonstrates efficient reduction of musical noise without creating ?noise echoes? inherent in time-smoothing methods.