Hybrid Noise Reduction for Audio Captured by Drones
Hyohoon Ahn Duc Tai Le
Sungkyunkwan University Sungkyunkwan University
Suwon, South Korea Suwon, South Korea
hyohoon@skku.edu ldtai@skku.edu
Siwon Kim
Sungkyunkwan University
Suwon, South Korea
siwon.kim59@gmail.com
ABSTRACT
Recently, advances in technology have reduced the sizes, lowered
prices, and increased commercial use of drones. In the market,
drones have become an inexpensive and accessible way to
accomplish many tasks such as filming, surveillance, agriculture,
delivery, and broadcasting. Such applications typically require a
video recording for their operations. However, due to the noise
generated by propellers and rotors of a drone, the quality of sound
in a video recorded by the drone is quite limited. In order to solve
the noise problem of drones, this paper proposes a novel hybrid
noise reduction technique combining Active Noise Control and
Spectral subtraction methods. Experimental results show that the
proposed technique produces a speech signal with up to 67.5%
similarity to the original signal. It outperforms Active Noise
Control and Spectral Subtraction with similarities of 53.1% and
39.6%, respectively.
CCS CONCEPTS
• Hardware → Digital signal processing; • Information systems
→ Information systems applications;
KEYWORDS
Internet of Things, Drones, Noise reduction, Active Noise
Cancellation, Spectral subtraction
* Corresponding Author
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IMCOM '18, January 5–7, 2018, Langkawi, Malaysia
Copyright 2018 Association for Computing Machinery.
ACM ISBN 978-1-4503-6385-3/18/01…$15.00
https://doi.org/10.1145/3164541.3175682
Thien Binh Dang
Sungkyunkwan University
Suwon, South Korea
dtbinh@skku.edu
Hyunseung Choo*
College of Software
Sungkyunkwan University
Suwon, South Korea
choo@skku.edu
ACM Reference format:
H. Ahn, D. T. Le, T. B. Dang, S. Kim, and H. Choo. 2018. Hybrid Noise
Reduction for Audio Captured by Drones, In Proceedings of 12th
International conference on Ubiquitous Information Management and
communication (IMCOM’18), Langkawi, Malaysia, January 2018, 4 pages.
DOI: 10.1145/3164541.3164576
1 INTRODUCTION
In recent years, advancement in technology have resulted in size
reduction, low prices, and increased commercial and personal use
of drones [1]. In the market, drones are used for various
applications and services such as filming, surveillance, agriculture,
delivery, and broadcasting. Most of these applications and services
require video recording for their operations.
The first generation drones were difficult to use due to their
complex of hardware and software configuration and flight
manipulation. Furthermore, being expensive and large size, they
were not suitable for general purposes. However, as the technology
developed, the size of the drone became smaller and the price
became lower, the accessibility has increased. In addition, the drone
manufacturers provide various applications and many utilizing
functions are opened as open sources. Those applications and open
sources help users to capture images with stable flight and allow
users to achieve various missions.
Aerial photography using drones can extend the range of view
compared to ground photography by showing different scenes from
the sky. A flying drone provides multiple video capturing options
for filming videos. However, due to the noise generated by
propellers and rotors of a drone, the quality of sound in a video
captured by the drone is limited [2]. The noise of propellers and
rotors of the drone makes it difficult to utilize the audio in a video
recorded by the drone. In a film and a broadcast, the video and the
sound can be recorded separately by using external microphones.
However, there is a limitation in separating the video and sound
using an external microphone if the sound is processed with the
video in real time, such as a scene at a news site or a travel
destination, or a realistic feeling is required for the video.
 IMCOM’18, January 5-7, Langkawi, Malaysia
In order to solve the noise problem of drones, this paper proposes
a novel hybrid noise reduction technique that combines Active
Noise Control and Spectral subtraction to reduce noise of drones.
In addition, we demonstrate the superiority of the proposed method
by comparing the experimental results of the Hybrid noise
reduction with the results of existing noise reduction methods.
The rest of the paper is organized as follows. Section 2
introduces Passive Noise Control (PNC), Active Noise Control
(ANC), and Spectral subtraction. Section 3 proposes Hybrid noise
reduction. Section 4 shows the experimental results using ANC,
PNC, and Hybrid Noise Reduction. Section 5 presents the
conclusion and the future work.
2 RELATED WORK
The background noise is the most common factor worsening the
quality of audio in recordings. The noise reduction methods intend
to lower the noise level without affecting the desired audio signal
quality. These noise reduction methods are based on the Passive
Noise Control (PNC), Active Noise Control (ANC), and Spectral
subtraction.
PNC is a noise reduction method using the sound absorbing
material and sound insulating material. A sound absorbing material
absorbs part of the sound energy that hits the surface of the sound
absorbing material. The absorber can reduce the reflected sound
and the noise. The sound insulating material is installed as an
obstacle in the path of the sound waves, and reflects the sound
waves hitting the wall to reduce the energy of the sound waves to
be transmitted. PNC is effective for high-frequency and it is easy
to apply, but due to the price and weight of the soundproofing
material, there is a limitation applying it to the air vehicle [3]. In
order to overcome these limitations, researchers have developed an
Active Noise Control method.
Figure 1: Active Noise Control
ANC is a noise reduction method that detects disturbed noises
and reduces noise by generating another noise that is opposite to
the other noise. In ANC, interference between two noise signals
occurs because sound is transmitted as waves. Cancellation during
interference is a phenomenon in which mutually opposing waves
are mutually extinguished when superimposed. ANC reduces noise
using destructive interference. The ANC deals effectively with the
H. Ahn et al.
size and weight of the object compared to the PNC. Fig. 1 shows
the operating principle of ANC. To reduce noise, the ANC detects
background noise through an additional microphone. The ANC
uses the background noise to generate the opposite sound wave and
emit it through the speaker to control the noise around the speaker.
The existing noise and the opposite sound wave emitted through
the speaker cause interference and cancel to reduce the noise.
However, in the real environment, it is difficult to reduce noise by
simply emitting opposing waves because superimposed sound
waves should be exact opposite to cancel noise. The ANC uses an
adaptive filter to control the changing noise in the real environment.
An adaptive filter is a filter that operates in a direction that can
obtain optimum results with the ability to adapt its characteristics
according to a change in an input signal or a change in an output.
The adaptive filter does not set all the characteristics at the time of
designing the filter and the characteristics are determined according
to the environment after the operation of the filter. The most
commonly used adaptive filter is the Least Mean Square (LMS)
filter algorithm [4-6]. The LMS filter removes the noise signal from
the received signal by detecting and minimizing the relative error
between the desired signal and the noise signal. The LMS algorithm
aims to find an adaptive filter with a minimum error using the
weight setting [7].
Spectral subtraction method is a single-input noise reduction
method developed for speech enhancement by reducing the white
noise and restoring the power spectrum of the observed signal [8,
10]. In this method, an average signal spectrum and average noise
spectrum are estimated in parts of the recording. These spectrums
are subtracted from each other to improve average signal-to-noise
ratio (SNR). SNR is a measure that compares the level of a desired
signal to the level of background noise. Noise estimation is
important to get the effective result of the spectral subtraction [9].
It is assumed that the noise estimate is the same during the
calculation and the restoration. Also, the phase is the same in the
original signal and restored signal. Noise is estimated using the
period of signal where only noise exists without any desired signal.
Once the noise estimation is calculated, noise spectrum is
subtracted to the input magnitude spectrum or power spectrum.
Spectral subtraction removes noise by using the power spectrum of
sound, so it can’t remove noise if the noise to be removed is larger
than the desired signal to enhance.
3 HYBRID NOISE REDUCTION
In this paper, Hybrid noise reduction is proposed to solve noise
problem in recordings captured by drones. Hybrid noise reduction
is a combination of ANC and Spectral subtraction. The noise of
propellers and rotors captured by a drone shows a constant
waveform pattern. To remove the noise using the concept of ANC
and LMS adaptive filter, it is necessary to use pure drone noise as
an input to generate inverse noise to cancel noise from a target
sound signal. In case of a drone, a constant waveform pattern which
drone noise shows makes it easier to detect the noise in a target
sound signal. To reduce the noise from the target sound, the
proposed technique uses two microphones attached to the drone.
The first microphone is for recording a target sound which contains
 Hybrid noise reduction for audio captured by drones IMCOM’18, January 2018, Langkawi, Malaysia

desired sound, such as speech, and noise of propellers and rotors. signal that contains propeller noise captured by a drone and is
The second microphone is for recording noise of propellers and recorded from the second microphone of the drone. Noisy speech
rotors only. is a signal that is a combination of speech and drone noise and is
the target signal recorded from the first microphone of the drone.

Figure 2: System Architecture

The operation of the proposed technique is as follows. The

drone records sound from the target. While recording, the drone
uses two microphones to simultaneously acquire the target sound
signal and the noise only signal. The drone applies ANC with LMS
Figure 3: Noise reduction with ANC.
adaptive filter using two audio signals, desired and noise, captured
by the drone as input signals. The noise only signal is used to
In noisy speech, it is difficult to find similarity with speech signal
generate a sound wave that has opposite waveform to the noise due to its noise. Noise reduced signal can be obtained by applying
signal in the target signal. The drone emits generated inverse noise ANC to the noisy speech signal using drone noise as a secondary
through the speaker to control the noise around the drone. The input. The noise reduced signal and the original speech signal
primary noise control allows the drone to record audio which has obtained from the experiment show similarity of 53.1%.
lower lever of noise than desired signal. After the primary noise
reduction is processed and noise reduced audio is recorded, the 4.2 Noise reduction with Spectral subtraction
secondary noise reduction with Spectral subtraction is processed to Spectral subtraction is a single-input noise reduction technique
reduce the remaining noise. The noise detected in the result of which requires only target sound signal that contains a desired
primary noise reduction has weaker power spectrum than desired signal and a noise. Fig. 4 shows the experimental results obtained
signal. Spectral subtraction can achieve efficient result when a by applying spectral subtraction to the noise captured by the drone.
noise to be reduced has smaller magnitude or power spectrum. As
a result of the secondary noise reduction, clean audio can be
obtained.

4 EXPERIMENTS
We have experimented noise reduction with three technique, ANC,
Spectral subtraction, and Hybrid noise reduction, to compare
performance of each techniques. Experiments were carried out
using recorded speech signals of the person and the noise of
propellers and rotors captured by hovering drone.. The
experimental method is as follows. Combining the speech signal
and the noise signal, a target signal is generated. It is typical form
of sound recorded by the drones which is mixed with the noise.

4.1 Noise reduction with ANC

ANC is double-input noise reduction technique which requires
target sound signal, which contains desired signal and noise, and
noise only signal. Noise only signal is used to generate inverse Figure 4: Noise reduction with Spectral subtraction.
noise to cancel noise from target sound signal. Fig. 3 shows the
experimental results with ANC. In Fig. 3, speech is the original In Fig. 4, speech is the recorded voice of the speaker. Drone noise
speech sound recorded from the person. Drone noise is a noise only is a noise signal from a drone and is recorded from the second

3
 IMCOM’18, January 5-7, Langkawi, Malaysia
microphone of the drone. Noisy speech is a signal that is a
combination of speech and drone noise and is the target signal
recorded from the first microphone of the drone. Spectral
subtraction uses only one input signal unlike ANC. Spectral
subtraction uses Noisy speech to detect noise only period and
generates predictive noise. Predictive noise is used for subtracting
noise. Noise reduced signal is the result of reducing noise by
applying spectral subtraction to the noisy speech signal. The noise
reduced signal and the original speech signal obtained from the
experiment show similarity of 39.6%. Due to the characteristic of
spectral subtraction which it can’t control noise effectively when
noise is greater than desired signal, the result obtained with spectral
subtraction is worse than the result obtained with ANC under same
experiment condition.
4.3 Noise reduction with Hybrid noise reduction
Hybrid noise reduction is a combination of ANC and spectral
subtraction. It has two phases of noise reduction. In first phase,
primary noise reduction is processed with ANC while the drone is
recording a target sound. A noise only signal and a target sound
signal are necessary for applying ANC in this phase. Same as the
experiment with ANC, the drone generates inverse noise signal
using noise input and emit it through speaker. Two noises with
opposite waveform cancel each other causing interference. As a
result of the first phase, a drone can capture primary noise reduced
target sound. After recording noise reduced signal by ANC, the
secondary noise reduction phase is processed with spectral
subtraction. The second phase uses noise reduced target sound
obtained by the first phase as an input signal. Spectral subtraction
reduces the remaining noise from the audio obtained by ANC.
Figure 5: Noise reduction with Hybrid Noise Reduction
Fig. 5 shows the result of applying hybrid noise reduction to drones.
Speech is an original speech of a person without any noise. Result
of ANC is same signal as Noise reduced signal in Fig. 3. Noise
reduced signal in Fig. 5 is the result of hybrid noise reduction by
applying Spectral subtraction to result of ANC. The noise reduced
signal and the original speech signal obtained from the experiment
H. Ahn et al.
show 67.5% similarity. Experimental results show that Hybrid
noise reduction is effective for noise reduction in drones than
conventional noise reduction methods.
5 CONCLUSION
In this paper, we propose Hybrid Noise reduction, a noise control
method combining ANC and spectral subtraction to solve the noise
problem of drones. Proposed method has two phases in noise
reduction. First phase is noise reduction in the recording moment
of the drone. In the first phase, ANC is applied to control the
primary noise of the drone. After the first phase, the spectral
subtraction is applied to the result of the first phase to reduce
remaining noise in the audio obtained from ANC. Experimental
result shows that the noise reduced by Hybrid Noise Reduction has
67.5% similarity compared to the original audio. The experimental
results of ANC and spectral subtraction show similarity of 53.1%
and 39.6% to the original speech signal. The results show that the
proposed noise reduction method can operate more effectively in
the drone recording environment than the conventional noise
reducing method.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This research was partially supported by PRCP (NRF-2010-
0020210) and G-ITRC support program (IITP-2017-2015-0-
00742), respectively.
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