A Noise Reduction Strategy via Coprime-Spacing Subarrays for Biodiversity Acoustic Indices

CHEN Lei; XU Zhiyong; ZHAO Zhao

doi:10.11999/JEIT260237

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CHEN Lei, XU Zhiyong, ZHAO Zhao. A Noise Reduction Strategy via Coprime-Spacing Subarrays for Biodiversity Acoustic Indices[J]. Journal of Electronics & Information Technology. doi: 10.11999/JEIT260237

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CHEN Lei, XU Zhiyong, ZHAO Zhao. A Noise Reduction Strategy via Coprime-Spacing Subarrays for Biodiversity Acoustic Indices[J]. Journal of Electronics & Information Technology. doi: 10.11999/JEIT260237

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A Noise Reduction Strategy via Coprime-Spacing Subarrays for Biodiversity Acoustic Indices

doi: 10.11999/JEIT260237 cstr: 32379.14.JEIT260237

CHEN Lei¹,
XU Zhiyong^{1
,
,},
ZHAO Zhao¹

School of Electronic and Optical Engineering, Nanjing University of Science and Technology, Nanjing 210094, China

Received Date: 2026-03-05
Accepted Date: 2026-05-15
Rev Recd Date: 2026-05-15

Available Online: 2026-06-03

Abstract

Abstract

Objective As a popular tool for rapid biodiversity assessment, acoustic indices have attracted increasing attention in the field of soundscape ecology in recent years. Nevertheless, most commonly used acoustic indices are susceptible to background noise. Traditional single-channel noise reduction strategies, including spectral subtraction, high-pass filtering, and threshold detection, have been widely adopted as preprocessing approaches to optimize the calculation of acoustic indices. However, when dealing with anthropogenic interference that overlaps with biotic signals in both time and frequency domains, the denoising capability of single-channel methods degrades severely. Although spatio-temporal adaptive whitening filtering based on microphone arrays provides a feasible approach for suppressing directional interference, it suffers from a non-uniform two-dimensional spatio-temporal amplitude response and the self-cancellation of target signal in the unconstrained interference cancellation. These disadvantages lead to distortion in the time-frequency distribution of target signals, causing acoustic index calculations to deviate from the ground truth. Therefore, this study aims to propose a noise reduction strategy via coprime-spacing subarrays for biodiversity acoustic indices. This method effectively suppresses directional interference while maximally preserving the time-frequency distribution structure of biotic signals. Methods The noise reduction strategy based on microphone array spatio-temporal adaptive whitening filtering is proposed, incorporating the Frequency-dependent Acoustic Diversity Index (FADI), which is insensitive to fluctuations in the array's two-dimensional spatio-temporal amplitude response. A noise-robust acoustic index method, termed Adaptive Interference Cancellation–Frequency-dependent Acoustic Diversity Index (AIC-FADI), is subsequently developed. Specifically, a non-uniform linear array is first constructed using three microphones to form two dual-element subarrays with coprime spacing. This design fully exploits the high spatial resolution of wide-spacing arrays to narrow the null width in the direction of interference. Meanwhile, it avoids the physical implementation difficulties and mutual coupling effects associated with small-spacing array designs caused by the ultra-wideband characteristics of target signals. The spatio-temporal adaptive whitening filtering is then performed on each coprime-spacing subarray separately, adaptively forming two-dimensional nulls within the interference support region, thereby suppressing directional anthropogenic interference in analytical data before index calculation. Next, a frequency-dependent threshold scheme is utilized to obtain the binary spectrogram for each coprime-spacing subarray output, abating the influence from gain differences along the frequency axis for a certain direction. Afterwards, by leveraging the high spatial resolution of wide-spacing arrays and the interleaved characteristics of spatial aliasing null positions between the spatio-temporal frequency responses of the two subarrays with coprime spacing, a pointwise maximum fusion is applied to the above two binary spectrograms. This process reconstructs the binary time-frequency distribution structure of target signals outside the interference support region, leading to a single binary spectrogram where biological sound components are preserved to a great extent and anthropogenic interference is considerably suppressed. Ultimately, from this single binary spectrogram, the proportions of non-zero time-frequency bins within each frequency band are calculated and forwarded to the entropy function, resulting in the final AIC-FADI result. Results and Discussions The simulation result indicates that the proposed AIC-FADI maintains numerical robustness across an SINR range down to –15 dB (the yellow line in Fig. 5), substantially outperforming the classical ADI version based on single-channel noise reduction algorithm (FADI) and other ADI versions based on single-array interference suppression processing mentioned in this paper (AIC-FADI-s, AIC-FADI1, and AIC-FADI2). The real-world experiment confirms that the proposed spatio-temporal adaptive whitening filtering effectively suppresses wideband interference signals in complex scenarios, thereby improving the SINR of the analyzed recording. This enables some weaker biotic signals to exceed their corresponding frequency-dependent adaptive thresholds, greatly reducing missed detection of the target signal. In addition, by performing pointwise maximum fusion of the binary spectrograms from the two coprime-spacing subarray outputs, AIC-FADI further alleviates the extent of target signal missed detection (Fig. 8). Nevertheless, the real-world experiments also reveal that the interference suppression performance of AIC-FADI degrades for highly time-varying interference components. Conclusions This paper addresses the challenge of calculating acoustic indices reliably in complex soundscapes where directional anthropogenic interference overlaps with biotic signals in both time and frequency domains. A noise reduction strategy using coprime-spacing subarrays is proposed, and a new noise-robust acoustic index (AIC-FADI) is then developed. The method is evaluated through simulations and real-world recordings, and the results show that: (1) By applying spatio-temporal adaptive whitening filtering on each coprime-spacing subarray followed by pointwise maximum fusion, the proposed method achieves both wideband interference suppression capability and target information fidelity in complex soundscapes containing strong interference. (2) As a result, the proposed AIC-FADI maintains numerical robustness down to –15 dB SINR, substantially outperforming the classical FADI algorithm and other ADI versions based on single-array interference suppression methods. (3) The proposed method provides a feasible technical solution for extending the practical application scenarios and spatio-temporal coverage of biodiversity acoustic indices in human-dominated areas. However, this study only considers directional interference that is relatively stable or slowly time-varying. Hence, the interference suppression performance degrades for highly time-varying or uncorrelated noise components. These challenges should be addressed in future work through more advanced signal processing techniques to further improve the robustness of acoustic indices in highly complex acoustic environments.
- Microphone array,
- Adaptive interference cancellation,
- Spatio-temporal adaptive filtering,
- Spatial aliasing effect mitigation,
- Acoustic index

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References(16)

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