4.4 Conclusions and oppurtunities for further work

Conclusions and opportunities for further work

Conclusion:

Our Wiener deconvolution process demonstrates that echo removal is indeed possible. Unfortunately the proceduregenerates a relatively noisy output signal and would only be useful in the presence of extreme environmental distortion (e.g. roomechoes cause the signal to be unintelligible). With a few modifications however, deconvolution could remove echoes reliablyas well as preserve the quality of our signal

Improvements:

Wiener deconvolution relies on previous statistical knowledge of both the additive noise and the originalsignal being restored. The statistical characteristics of the room could not be approximated; so normal deconvolution was used,resulting in a significant increase in noise. Possible alternatives to using deconvolution to find the room’s respone and address thisissue are:

• Measure impulse response by recording the result of an impulse generator (e.g. starter’s pistol) in the room.
• Measure frequency response by “sweeping through” generated sine waves of different frequencies.

Also, advanced noise filtering techniques would improve signal quality at every step in the process. Sincedeconvolution tends to amplify noise, filtering would profoundly improve the quality of output signals in this multi-step procedure.For example, filtering to remove noise of the test recording before deconvolving it with the room response could help reduce the noisein the final recovered signal.