Yahoo! JAPAN R&D

Ryoji Miyahara （NEC Platforms Ltd.）, Akihiko Sugiyama（Yahoo Japan Corp.）, and Kensuke Hayashi（NEC Platforms Ltd.） received the 2019（67th） Electrical Science and Engineering Promotion Award from the Promotion Foundation for Electrical Science and Engineering for Development of Mechanical-Noise Suppression Technologies and Their Applications to Commercial Products.

The developed mechanical-noise suppressors, which suppress the mechanical-noise interfering the target speech for enhancement, have been incorporated, for the first time in the world, in mobile-phone handsets to suppress auto-focusing noise and digital cameras to suppress zooming noise. Randomization of the input-signal phase significantly enhances suppression, which defied the 34-year old knowledge that amplitude manipulation is sufficient for good noise suppression. Power loss caused by phase randomization was further identified and compensation is applied to the mechanical-noise suppression algorithms. For impact noise caused by typing and tapping on a personal computer （PC） or a tablet PC, phase-frequency linearity was identified to provide better impact noise detection. These mechanical-noise suppression algorithms have been shipped in 10 M mobile phone handsets and 200K compact digital cameras.