Impulse noise is a category of ( acoustic)

noise Noise is unwanted sound considered unpleasant, loud or disruptive to hearing. From a physics standpoint, there is no distinction between noise and desired sound, as both are vibrations through a medium, such as air or water. The difference aris ...

that includes unwanted, almost instantaneous (thus

impulse Impulse or Impulsive may refer to: Science * Impulse (physics), in mechanics, the change of momentum of an object; the integral of a force with respect to time * Impulse noise (disambiguation) * Specific impulse, the change in momentum per uni ...

-like) sharp sounds (like clicks and pops)—typically caused by electromagnetic interference, scratches on disks,

gunfire A gunshot is a single discharge of a gun, typically a man-portable firearm, producing a visible flash, a powerful and loud shockwave and often chemical gunshot residue. The term can also refer to a ballistic wound caused by such a discharg ...

, explosions, and synchronization issues in digital audio. High levels of such a noise (200+ decibels) may damage internal organs, while 180 decibels are enough to damage human ears. An impulse noise filter can enhance the quality of noisy signals to achieve robustness in pattern recognition and adaptive control systems. A classic filter used to remove impulse noise is the

median filter The median filter is a non-linear digital filtering technique, often used to remove noise from an image or signal. Such noise reduction is a typical pre-processing step to improve the results of later processing (for example, edge detection on an ...

, at the expense of signal degradation. Thus it's quite common to get better performing impulse noise filters with model-based systems, which are programmed with the time and frequency properties of the noise to remove only impulse obliterated samples.

References

Noise (electronics) Acoustics Sound {{Tech-stub

See also

References