CN107785028B - Voice noise reduction method and device based on signal autocorrelation - Google Patents

Voice noise reduction method and device based on signal autocorrelation Download PDF

Info

Publication number
CN107785028B
CN107785028B CN201610725981.5A CN201610725981A CN107785028B CN 107785028 B CN107785028 B CN 107785028B CN 201610725981 A CN201610725981 A CN 201610725981A CN 107785028 B CN107785028 B CN 107785028B
Authority
CN
China
Prior art keywords
signal
module
voice
autocorrelation
noise reduction
Prior art date
Legal status (The legal status is an assumption and is not a legal conclusion. Google has not performed a legal analysis and makes no representation as to the accuracy of the status listed.)
Active
Application number
CN201610725981.5A
Other languages
Chinese (zh)
Other versions
CN107785028A (en
Inventor
刘海生
姚建琴
王海玲
陆晓兰
倪强
Current Assignee (The listed assignees may be inaccurate. Google has not performed a legal analysis and makes no representation or warranty as to the accuracy of the list.)
Shanghai Yingbo Acoustic Engineering Technology Co ltd
Original Assignee
Shanghai Yingbo Acoustic Engineering Technology Co ltd
Priority date (The priority date is an assumption and is not a legal conclusion. Google has not performed a legal analysis and makes no representation as to the accuracy of the date listed.)
Filing date
Publication date
Application filed by Shanghai Yingbo Acoustic Engineering Technology Co ltd filed Critical Shanghai Yingbo Acoustic Engineering Technology Co ltd
Priority to CN201610725981.5A priority Critical patent/CN107785028B/en
Publication of CN107785028A publication Critical patent/CN107785028A/en
Application granted granted Critical
Publication of CN107785028B publication Critical patent/CN107785028B/en
Active legal-status Critical Current
Anticipated expiration legal-status Critical

Links

Images

Classifications

    • GPHYSICS
    • G10MUSICAL INSTRUMENTS; ACOUSTICS
    • G10LSPEECH ANALYSIS TECHNIQUES OR SPEECH SYNTHESIS; SPEECH RECOGNITION; SPEECH OR VOICE PROCESSING TECHNIQUES; SPEECH OR AUDIO CODING OR DECODING
    • G10L21/00Speech or voice signal processing techniques to produce another audible or non-audible signal, e.g. visual or tactile, in order to modify its quality or its intelligibility
    • G10L21/02Speech enhancement, e.g. noise reduction or echo cancellation
    • G10L21/0208Noise filtering
    • G10L21/0216Noise filtering characterised by the method used for estimating noise
    • G10L21/0232Processing in the frequency domain

Landscapes

  • Engineering & Computer Science (AREA)
  • Computational Linguistics (AREA)
  • Quality & Reliability (AREA)
  • Signal Processing (AREA)
  • Health & Medical Sciences (AREA)
  • Audiology, Speech & Language Pathology (AREA)
  • Human Computer Interaction (AREA)
  • Physics & Mathematics (AREA)
  • Acoustics & Sound (AREA)
  • Multimedia (AREA)
  • Noise Elimination (AREA)

Abstract

The invention relates to a voice noise reduction method and a voice noise reduction device based on signal autocorrelation, which comprise the following steps: 1) the voice receiving module collects a noise-containing analog voice signal; 2) the A/D conversion module converts the analog signal into a digital signal; 3) the voice framing module frames the digital signal; 4) the autocorrelation denoising module carries out autocorrelation operation on the framed signal; 5) the FFT analysis module performs FFT analysis on the autocorrelation function of each frame of noisy signals in a time delay domain; 6) the threshold denoising module performs threshold denoising processing on the FFT; 7) the resampling and phase pairing module resamples the frequency domain autocorrelation signal and pairs the frequency domain autocorrelation signal with the phase of the noisy signal; 8) the inverse FFT module carries out inverse FFT by using the processed frequency domain amplitude and phase and returns the signal to the time domain; 9) and the frame recombination module recombines the denoised frame signals to obtain the denoised voice signals. The device can obviously improve the speech definition in a strong noise environment with a signal-to-noise ratio of-20 dB.

Description

Voice noise reduction method and device based on signal autocorrelation
Technical Field
The present invention relates to noise reduction technology in the field of speech recognition, and in particular, to a speech noise reduction method and apparatus based on signal autocorrelation.
Background
Voice noise reduction is mainly applied to voice recognition in man-machine conversation and the field of voice communication (including traditional wired communication, wireless communication and network communication). The voice noise greatly reduces the capability of intelligent equipment and human ears to correctly recognize the voice, and the voice noise reduction enhances the recognition rate of the voice in a noise environment. It is therefore also desirable to use speech noise reduction techniques in man-machine dialogues and communication devices that enhance the accuracy with which intelligent devices recognize and execute speech commands, reduce human fatigue from recognizing noisy speech, and improve speech intelligibility.
The conventional speech noise reduction methods are mainly as follows: noise cancellation, harmonic enhancement, speech model enhancement, short-term spectrum enhancement, and filtering. However, due to the complexity and non-stationarity of the speech signal, these conventional noise reduction methods are difficult to reduce noise of a signal with a signal-to-noise ratio lower than 10dB, and perform effective recognition, especially, the suppression effect on broadband noise, transient noise, and strong noise is not satisfactory.
The invention develops a voice noise reduction technology under a strong noise environment based on the pronunciation characteristics of Chinese. The Chinese language is distinguished from the phonation of the alphabetic writing and has the characteristics that: the unvoiced sound must be aided by voiced sound, so the frequency characteristics of the unvoiced sound are obvious, unlike the continuous unvoiced sound of the alphabetic writing, the unvoiced sound has no obvious time domain and frequency domain characteristics during the sound production, and is very similar to white noise. By utilizing the characteristic, after the autocorrelation operation is carried out on the Chinese speech signal, the autocorrelation value of the speech signal with the frequency characteristic is larger, so that the autocorrelation value is enhanced and retained, and the autocorrelation value of the noise signal with the weaker frequency characteristic is smaller and is restrained. In the FFT-transformed frequency domain of the autocorrelation function, it appears that the frequency amplitude of the speech signal is large, and the frequency amplitude of the noise is small. After threshold processing is carried out on the frequency signal, denoising can be further carried out, and denoising of the voice signal is achieved.
Disclosure of Invention
The invention aims to overcome the defects of the existing voice noise reduction technology, and provides a voice noise reduction method and a voice noise reduction device which are accurate, rapid and high in automation degree.
The purpose of the invention can be realized by the following technical scheme:
a voice noise reduction method based on signal autocorrelation comprises the following steps:
1) the voice receiving module receives and collects a voice signal containing noise through a microphone and transmits the voice signal to the A/D conversion module;
2) the A/D conversion module converts the collected analog voice signals into digital signals and transmits the digital signals to the voice framing module;
3) the voice framing module frames the voice digital signal, the time length is 20-30 ms, and then the framed signal is transmitted to the self-correlation denoising module;
4) the autocorrelation denoising module performs autocorrelation operation on the framed signal to realize preliminary denoising, and then transmits the signal to the FFT analysis module;
5) the FFT analysis module performs FFT analysis on the autocorrelation function of each frame of noisy signals in a time delay domain, expands the autocorrelation function into a function in a frequency domain, and then transmits a series of amplitudes in the frequency domain to the threshold noise reduction module;
6) the threshold noise reduction module sets the frequency component amplitude value lower than the threshold value to zero by setting the threshold value to realize secondary noise reduction, and transmits the processed amplitude value to the resampling and phase matching module;
7) the resampling and phase matching module resamples the processed amplitude, takes a half of the number of points, matches the resampled signal amplitude with the phase of the noise-containing signal, and then transmits the combination of the matched amplitude and phase to the inverse FFT conversion module;
8) the inverse FFT conversion module performs inverse FFT conversion on the resampled amplitude and the matched noise-containing signal phase, returns the signal to a time domain, and then transmits the signal in the time domain to the frame recombination module;
9) and the frame recombination module performs frame recombination on the signals to form a complete denoised voice signal so as to complete the denoising process.
The working parameters of the voice receiving module comprise a signal acquisition channel, sampling frequency and acquisition signal duration;
the working parameters of the voice framing module comprise signal framing duration;
the working parameters of the threshold noise reduction module comprise a noise reduction threshold.
A device of a voice noise reduction method based on signal autocorrelation is characterized by comprising a voice receiving module, an A/D conversion module, a voice framing module, an autocorrelation denoising module, an FFT analysis module, a threshold denoising module, a resampling and phase pairing module, an inverse FFT conversion module and a frame recombination module.
The voice receiving module comprises a signal acquisition channel, a sampling frequency and a signal acquisition duration, and sends acquired voice signals to the voice framing module.
The voice framing module needs to set the signal framing duration;
the autocorrelation denoising module performs autocorrelation operation on the signal, and the short-time autocorrelation function of the speech signal s (n) with limited energy is defined as:
Figure BDA0001091031800000031
m is the number of time delay points, and n is the number of signal duration points.
The FFT analysis module is used for carrying out fast Fourier transform on the autocorrelation function to obtain the frequency domain representation of the autocorrelation function.
The threshold noise reduction module resets the frequency amplitude lower than the set threshold to zero, and keeps the frequency amplitude higher than the threshold unchanged to obtain a group of new Fourier transform coefficients, and sends the new Fourier transform coefficients to the resampling and phase matching module.
The resampling and phase matching module performs point-isolated sampling on the Fourier transform coefficient, then matches the Fourier transform coefficient with the phase of the acquired signal, and combines and sends the Fourier transform coefficient and the phase of the acquired signal to the inverse FFT module;
the inverse FFT module carries out inverse FFT by using the resampled amplitude and the matched phase to obtain a denoised time domain signal and then sends the denoised time domain signal to the frame recombination module;
and the frame recombination module is used for recombining each frame signal after the denoising processing to obtain a complete speech signal after the denoising processing.
The voice signal s (t) collected by the voice receiving module, besides the useful voice signal v (t), also has the noise n (t) in the environment, and makes autocorrelation operation on the signal, i.e. making said signal undergo the process of filtering treatment
s(t)*s(t)=[v(t)+n(t)]*[v(t)+n(t)]
Assuming that the Fourier transforms (FFT) of s (t), v (t), n (t) are S (f), V (f), N (f), respectively, the Fourier transform of the autocorrelation operation of s (t) can be represented as:
F[s(t)*s(t)]=S(f)·S*(f)=[V(f)+N(f)]·[V*(f)+N*(f)]
=V(f)·V*(f)+V(f)·N*(f)+N(f)·V*(f)+N(f)·N*(f)
≈V(f)*V*(f)+Z(f)
i.e. V (t) the amplitude of the autocorrelation in the frequency domain | V (f). V*(f) And | is the square of the amplitude of the original signal in the frequency domain. The frequency domain of the autocorrelation function also contains the frequency component z (f) of the noise signal.
The speech signal can be approximately regarded as a quasi-steady-state signal with remarkable frequency characteristics in a short time, and the noise is a random signal with unstable amplitude, frequency and phase. Through the autocorrelation processing, the voice signal is preserved because the signals at different times have correlation. While noise is suppressed because of the small signal correlation at different times. The correlation operation process can play a role of preliminary noise reduction.
Because the frequency of the voice is concentrated in a limited narrow band, the amplitude of the voice in the frequency domain is large, the frequency band of the noise is wide, the voice is distributed on the whole frequency domain, and the amplitude of the voice is low, so that the frequency component lower than a certain threshold value is used as the noise to be processed, the amplitude of the voice is zero, most of Z (f) is eliminated, and the denoising effect can be realized again.
The frequency domain autocorrelation function after two times of denoising is used for squaring the frequency domain amplitude, so the spectral characteristic of the frequency domain autocorrelation function is very close to the spectral characteristic of a clean voice signal, the point number of the autocorrelation calculation V (f) and V (f) in the frequency domain is two times 2N of the point number V (f), half of the point number N is taken for resampling, and then the resampled signal V' (f) is matched with the phase of a noise-containing signal.
Drawings
FIG. 1 is a schematic structural view of the present invention;
fig. 2 is a time domain waveform diagram of each signal.
Detailed Description
The invention is described in detail below with reference to the figures and specific embodiments.
Examples
As shown in fig. 1, the present invention firstly receives and collects a speech signal polluted by noise, and then performs denoising processing on the speech signal based on a signal autocorrelation technique to obtain a speech signal with high signal-to-noise ratio and greatly improved intelligibility. The denoising device comprises a voice receiving module 1, an A/D conversion module 2, a voice framing module 3, an autocorrelation denoising module 4, an FFT analysis module 5, a threshold denoising module 6, a resampling and phase pairing module 7, an inverse FFT conversion module 8 and a frame recombination module 9.
The voice receiving module receives and collects a voice signal s (t) (v) (t) + n (t) containing noise through a microphone and transmits the voice signal s (t) (v) (t) + n (t) containing noise to the A/D conversion module; the A/D conversion module converts the collected analog voice signals into digital signals and transmits the digital signals to the voice framing module; the voice framing module frames the voice digital signal, the time length is 20-30 ms, and then the framed signal is transmitted to the self-correlation denoising module; the autocorrelation denoising module performs autocorrelation operation on the framed signal to realize preliminary denoising, and then transmits the signal to the FFT analysis module; the FFT analysis module performs FFT analysis on an autocorrelation function s (t) of each frame of noisy signals s (t) in a delay domain, expands the autocorrelation function s (f) of each frame of noisy signals into a function S (f) in a frequency domain, and then transmits a series of amplitudes in the frequency domain to the threshold noise reduction module; the threshold processing is realized by setting a threshold, setting the frequency component lower than the threshold to zero, realizing secondary denoising, and transmitting the processed amplitude combination to a resampling and phase pairing module; the resampling and phase matching module resamples the processed amplitude, takes half of the point number N, matches the resampled signal V' (f) with the phase of the noise-containing signal, and then transmits the combination of the matched amplitude and phase to the inverse FFT conversion module. And the inverse FFT module performs inverse FFT on the V' (f) and the phase of the matched noise-containing signal, returns the signal to a time domain and then transmits the signal in the time domain to the frame recombination module. And the frame recombination module performs frame recombination on the signals to form a complete denoised voice signal so as to complete the denoising process.
The denoising process of the present invention is illustrated below:
a group of pure voice signals are respectively collected under the conditions of no noise interference, being submerged by white noise and signal-to-noise ratio of-20 dB, the sampling rate is 44100, the time length of the collected signals is 0.55s, the voice framing module is 2 (the signals are shorter), and the threshold value noise reduction module sets the threshold value to be 1500 (frequency components smaller than 1500 are all set to zero). FIG. 2 shows a comparison time domain waveform of a clean speech signal, a noisy signal and a denoised signal.
Comparing each oscillogram in fig. 2, it can be seen that after the denoising processing, the signal-to-noise ratio of the denoised signal is greatly improved compared with the noise-added signal, and the denoised signal has better consistency with the original voice signal. Compared with an audio file, the signal speech after being interfered by the noise cannot be identified, but the voice signal after being subjected to denoising processing can be clearly identified.

Claims (10)

1. A speech noise reduction method based on signal autocorrelation is characterized by comprising the following steps:
1) the voice receiving module receives and collects a voice signal containing noise through a microphone and transmits the voice signal to the A/D conversion module;
2) the A/D conversion module converts the collected analog voice signals into digital signals and transmits the digital signals to the voice framing module;
3) the voice framing module frames the voice digital signal, the time length is 20-30 ms, and then the framed signal is transmitted to the self-correlation denoising module;
4) the autocorrelation denoising module performs autocorrelation operation on the framed signal to realize preliminary denoising, and then transmits the signal to the FFT analysis module; the autocorrelation denoising module performs autocorrelation operation on the signal, and the short-time autocorrelation function of the speech signal s (n) with limited energy is defined as follows:
Figure FDA0003011049360000011
m is the number of time delay points, and n is the number of signal duration points;
5) the FFT analysis module performs FFT analysis on the autocorrelation function of each frame of noisy signals in a time delay domain, expands the autocorrelation function into a function in a frequency domain, and then transmits a series of amplitudes in the frequency domain to the threshold noise reduction module;
6) the threshold noise reduction module sets the frequency component amplitude value lower than the threshold value to zero by setting the threshold value to realize secondary noise reduction, and transmits the processed amplitude value to the resampling and phase matching module;
7) the resampling and phase matching module resamples the processed amplitude, takes a half of the number of points, matches the resampled signal amplitude with the phase of the noise-containing signal, and then transmits the combination of the matched amplitude and phase to the inverse FFT conversion module;
8) the inverse FFT conversion module performs inverse FFT conversion on the resampled amplitude and the matched noise-containing signal phase, returns the signal to a time domain, and then transmits the signal in the time domain to the frame recombination module;
9) and the frame recombination module performs frame recombination on the signals to form a complete denoised voice signal so as to complete the denoising process.
2. The method according to claim 1, wherein the operating parameters of the speech receiving module include a signal acquisition channel, a sampling frequency and a signal acquisition duration;
the working parameters of the voice framing module comprise signal framing duration;
the working parameters of the threshold noise reduction module comprise a noise reduction threshold.
3. The apparatus of the speech noise reduction method based on signal autocorrelation as claimed in claim 1, comprising a speech receiving module, an a/D conversion module, a speech framing module, an autocorrelation denoising module, an FFT analysis module, a threshold noise reduction module, a resampling and phase pairing module, an inverse FFT transformation module and a frame recombination module.
4. The device of claim 3, wherein the voice receiving module comprises a signal acquisition channel, a sampling frequency and a signal acquisition duration, and sends the acquired voice signal to the voice framing module.
5. The apparatus of claim 3, wherein the speech framing module is configured to set a signal framing duration.
6. The apparatus of claim 3, wherein the FFT analysis module performs a fast Fourier transform on the autocorrelation function to obtain a frequency domain representation of the autocorrelation function.
7. The apparatus of claim 3, wherein the threshold noise reduction module resets the frequency amplitudes below the set threshold to zero, and keeps the frequency amplitudes above the threshold unchanged to obtain a new set of Fourier transform coefficients, and sends the new set of Fourier transform coefficients to the resampling and phase matching module.
8. The apparatus of claim 3, wherein the resampling and phase matching module performs alternate sampling on the Fourier transform coefficients, matches the alternate sampling with the phase of the collected signal, and sends the combined signal to the inverse FFT module.
9. The apparatus of claim 3, wherein the inverse FFT module performs inverse FFT with the resampled amplitude and the matched phase to obtain a denoised time domain signal, and then sends the denoised time domain signal to the frame reassembly module.
10. The apparatus of claim 3, wherein the frame reconstructing module reconstructs the denoised frame signals to obtain a complete denoised speech signal.
CN201610725981.5A 2016-08-25 2016-08-25 Voice noise reduction method and device based on signal autocorrelation Active CN107785028B (en)

Priority Applications (1)

Application Number Priority Date Filing Date Title
CN201610725981.5A CN107785028B (en) 2016-08-25 2016-08-25 Voice noise reduction method and device based on signal autocorrelation

Applications Claiming Priority (1)

Application Number Priority Date Filing Date Title
CN201610725981.5A CN107785028B (en) 2016-08-25 2016-08-25 Voice noise reduction method and device based on signal autocorrelation

Publications (2)

Publication Number Publication Date
CN107785028A CN107785028A (en) 2018-03-09
CN107785028B true CN107785028B (en) 2021-06-18

Family

ID=61438771

Family Applications (1)

Application Number Title Priority Date Filing Date
CN201610725981.5A Active CN107785028B (en) 2016-08-25 2016-08-25 Voice noise reduction method and device based on signal autocorrelation

Country Status (1)

Country Link
CN (1) CN107785028B (en)

Families Citing this family (7)

* Cited by examiner, † Cited by third party
Publication number Priority date Publication date Assignee Title
CN108986840A (en) * 2018-04-03 2018-12-11 五邑大学 A kind of recognition methods during detecting electroscope to buzzer audio
CN109285556B (en) * 2018-09-29 2022-05-20 阿波罗智联(北京)科技有限公司 Audio processing method, device, equipment and storage medium
CN109587089B (en) * 2018-12-12 2021-04-09 北航(四川)西部国际创新港科技有限公司 Method for improving signal identification accuracy of unmanned aerial vehicle
CN110430316B (en) * 2019-06-25 2021-05-14 努比亚技术有限公司 Voice noise reduction method, mobile terminal and computer readable storage medium
CN110971763B (en) * 2019-12-10 2021-01-26 Oppo广东移动通信有限公司 Arrival reminding method and device, storage medium and electronic equipment
CN112190280B (en) * 2020-10-13 2022-10-14 苏州美糯爱医疗科技有限公司 Real-time automatic background sound interference cancellation method for electronic stethoscope
CN112331225B (en) * 2020-10-26 2023-09-26 东南大学 Method and device for assisting hearing in high-noise environment

Citations (3)

* Cited by examiner, † Cited by third party
Publication number Priority date Publication date Assignee Title
WO1999030415A2 (en) * 1997-12-05 1999-06-17 Telefonaktiebolaget Lm Ericsson (Publ) Noise reduction method and apparatus
CN2833787Y (en) * 2005-11-07 2006-11-01 郑硕钧 Noise suppression and anti-interference device for voice signals
CN102117621A (en) * 2010-01-05 2011-07-06 吴伟 Signal denoising method with self correlation coefficient as the criterion

Family Cites Families (2)

* Cited by examiner, † Cited by third party
Publication number Priority date Publication date Assignee Title
US5148488A (en) * 1989-11-17 1992-09-15 Nynex Corporation Method and filter for enhancing a noisy speech signal
DE102004005998B3 (en) * 2004-02-06 2005-05-25 Ruwisch, Dietmar, Dr. Separating sound signals involves Fourier transformation, inverse transformation using filter function dependent on angle of incidence with maximum at preferred angle and combined with frequency spectrum by multiplication

Patent Citations (3)

* Cited by examiner, † Cited by third party
Publication number Priority date Publication date Assignee Title
WO1999030415A2 (en) * 1997-12-05 1999-06-17 Telefonaktiebolaget Lm Ericsson (Publ) Noise reduction method and apparatus
CN2833787Y (en) * 2005-11-07 2006-11-01 郑硕钧 Noise suppression and anti-interference device for voice signals
CN102117621A (en) * 2010-01-05 2011-07-06 吴伟 Signal denoising method with self correlation coefficient as the criterion

Non-Patent Citations (2)

* Cited by examiner, † Cited by third party
Title
Speech Enhancement with Zero Replacement Signal;Iwai Yu等;《IEEE》;20151231;第143-147页 *
基于车载数字对讲机的语音降噪技术研究;黄春晖;《中国优秀硕士学位论文数据库 信息科技辑》;20081015(第10期);第I136-63页 *

Also Published As

Publication number Publication date
CN107785028A (en) 2018-03-09

Similar Documents

Publication Publication Date Title
CN107785028B (en) Voice noise reduction method and device based on signal autocorrelation
CN110600050B (en) Microphone array voice enhancement method and system based on deep neural network
CN109584903A (en) A kind of multi-person speech separation method based on deep learning
Xiao et al. Normalization of the speech modulation spectra for robust speech recognition
CN105390142B (en) A kind of digital deaf-aid voice noise removing method
CN106340303B (en) A kind of voice de-noising method based on temporal frequency domain
CN108198545B (en) Speech recognition method based on wavelet transformation
WO2001033550A1 (en) Speech parameter compression
CN109523999A (en) A kind of front end processing method and system promoting far field speech recognition
CN105719657A (en) Human voice extracting method and device based on microphone
CN110808057A (en) Voice enhancement method for generating confrontation network based on constraint naive
CN104240717B (en) Voice enhancement method based on combination of sparse code and ideal binary system mask
CN103400578B (en) Anti-noise voiceprint recognition device with joint treatment of spectral subtraction and dynamic time warping algorithm
CN112820311A (en) Echo cancellation method and device based on spatial prediction
Hamid et al. Speech enhancement using EMD based adaptive soft-thresholding (EMD-ADT)
CN110909827A (en) Noise reduction method suitable for fan blade sound signals
Hassani et al. Speech enhancement based on spectral subtraction in wavelet domain
CN106997766B (en) Homomorphic filtering speech enhancement method based on broadband noise
Yang et al. A speech enhancement algorithm combining spectral subtraction and wavelet transform
CN111009259A (en) Audio processing method and device
CN111968627B (en) Bone conduction voice enhancement method based on joint dictionary learning and sparse representation
CN104064197A (en) Method for improving speech recognition robustness on basis of dynamic information among speech frames
Cao et al. Study on speech endpoint detection algorithm based on wavelet energy entropy
CN110444222A (en) A kind of speech noise-reduction method based on comentropy weighting
CN111402909B (en) Speech enhancement method based on constant frequency domain transformation

Legal Events

Date Code Title Description
PB01 Publication
PB01 Publication
SE01 Entry into force of request for substantive examination
SE01 Entry into force of request for substantive examination
GR01 Patent grant
GR01 Patent grant