Highly-Accurate and Real-Time Speech Measurement for Laser Doppler Vibrometers

Abstract

Laser Doppler Vibrometers (LDVs) enable the acquisition of remote speech signals by measuring small-scale vibrations around a target. They are now widely used in the fields of information acquisition and national security. However, in remote speech detection, the coherent measurement signal is subject to environmental noise, making detecting and reconstructing speech signals challenging. To improve the detection distance and speech quality, this paper proposes a highly accurate real-time speech measurement method that can reconstruct speech from noisy coherent signals. First, the I/Q demodulation and arctangent phase discrimination are used to extract the phase transformation caused by the acoustic vibration from coherent signals. Then, an innovative smoothness criterion and a novel phase difference-based dynamic bilateral compensation phase unwrapping algorithm are used to remove any ambiguity caused by the arctangent phase discrimination in the previous step. This important innovation results in the highly accurate detection of phase jumps. After this, a further innovation is used to enhance the reconstructed speech by applying an improved waveform-based linear prediction coding method, together with adaptive spectral subtraction. This removes any impulsive or background noise. The accuracy and performance of the proposed method were validated by conducting extensive simulations and comparisons with existing techniques. The results show that the proposed algorithm can significantly improve the measurement of speech and the quality of reconstructed speech signals. The viability of the method was further assessed by undertaking a physical experiment, where LDV equipment was used to measure speech at a distance of 310m in an outdoor environment. The intelligibility rate for the reconstructed speech exceeded 95%, confirming the effectiveness and superiority of the method for long-distance laser speech measurement.