Orthogonality-Constrained CNMF-Based Noise Reduction with Reduced Degradation of Biological Sound.

The number of deaths due to cardiovascular and respiratory diseases is increasing annually. Cardiovascular diseases with high mortality rates, such as strokes, are frequently caused by atrial fibrillation without subjective symptoms. Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease is another condition in which early detection is difficult owing to the slow progression of the disease. Hence, a device that enables the early diagnosis of both diseases is necessary. In our previous study, a sensor for monitoring biological sounds such as vascular and respiratory sounds was developed and a noise reduction method based on semi-supervised convolutive non-negative matrix factorization (SCNMF) was proposed for the noisy environments of users. However, SCNMF attenuated part of the biological sound in addition to the noise. Therefore, this paper proposes a novel noise reduction method that achieves less distortion by imposing orthogonality constraints on the SCNMF. The effectiveness of the proposed method was verified experimentally using the biological sounds of 21 subjects. The experimental results showed an average improvement of 1.4 dB in the signal-to-noise ratio and 2.1 dB in the signal-to-distortion ratio over the conventional method. These results demonstrate the capability of the proposed approach to measure biological sounds even in noisy environments.