Wind-induced microphone noise detection - automatically monitoring the audio quality of field recordings

Wind-induced microphone noise is one of the most common problems leading to poor audio quality in recordings. A wind-noise detector could alert the operator of a recording device to the presence of wind noise so that appropriate action can be taken. This paper presents a single channel algorithm which, within the presence of other sounds, detects and classifies wind noise according to level. A large training database is formed from a wind noise simulator which generates an audio stream based on time histories of real wind velocities. A Support Vector Machine detects and classifies according to wind noise level in 25 ms frames which may contain other sounds. Statistical and temporal data from the detector over a sequence of frames is then used to provide estimates for the average wind noise level. The detector is successfully demonstrated on a number of devices with non-simulated data.