SIH26052: To develop an AI/ML-enabled adaptive noise cancellation (ANC) system that effect — SIH 2026 | Wynit

SIH26052: To develop an AI/ML-enabled adaptive noise cancellation (ANC) system that effect — SIH 2026 | Wynit

What they'll ask you

11

Generated from the brief's own wording and the competition's published rules, never from a guess about what this ministry prefers.

Specific defence noise audio samples to use for training?
The brief never answers this, so a panel will. Whatever you decide, say it the same way twice.
Exact latency threshold in milliseconds for real-time performance?
The brief never answers this, so a panel will. Whatever you decide, say it the same way twice.
Has any part of this been shown at a previous event, hackathon or college project?
The guidelines are explicit: your solution must not have appeared in any previous event or programme, of any sort. A recycled project is what a team under time pressure reaches for.

8 morethe ones a panel gets to if there is time

The brief asks for dataset generation pipeline. How would you build that?
Decoded from SIH26052 itself: Combine clean speech with defence noise datasets at varying SNR levels to create training pairs. The brief asks for it by name.
The brief asks for ai noise suppression model. How would you build that?
Decoded from SIH26052 itself: Train a machine learning model using time-frequency representations and perceptual loss functions. The brief asks for it by name.
The brief asks for edge inference engine. How would you build that?
Decoded from SIH26052 itself: Optimize and deploy the trained model onto embedded hardware for real-time processing. The brief asks for it by name.
The brief asks for hardware integration. How would you build that?
Decoded from SIH26052 itself: Connect microphones and headphones to the embedded platform to test live noise cancellation. The brief asks for it by name.
Where does your data come from: a published source, one you collect, or one you generate?
No dataset is attached to this problem statement, so sourcing it is part of the work and nobody told you that.
Why not use what already exists? Name the closest thing to this that is already running.
A team that has not named the alternative themselves is answering this for the first time in the room.
Which single thing will you demonstrate end to end, start to finish, with nothing skipped?
Ours, not a rule: a narrow thing that fully works survives questioning better than a broad thing that half works. If nobody on the team can name it, that is the finding.
Show me this working: the jury will test whether the system achieves SNR above 15 dB, STOI above 0.85, and PESQ above 2.5 while running in real time on edge hardware.
This is the evaluator read for your problem statement, decoded from the brief's own wording.

The government's original description (508 words)

• Background: In defence and mission-critical communication systems, reliable speech transmission is severely affected by diverse acoustic disturbances such as gunshots, artillery fire, helicopter rotor noise, armored vehicle sound and emergency sirens. Traditional signal processing techniquesâ€”like spectral subtraction, Wiener filtering, and classical LMS-based ANCâ€”are limited in handling highly dynamic and non-linear noise environments. These methods assume stationary noise characteristics and often introduce artifacts or speech distortion under rapidly changing conditions. Recent advancements in Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning (AI/ML) have transformed the field of speech enhancement and ANC. Deep learning models and time-domain architectures are capable of learning complex spectral-temporal patterns directly from data. These models significantly outperform conventional approaches in terms of perceptual quality (PESQ), intelligibility (STOI), and noise suppression (SNR). Additionally, the rise of edge AI platforms enables deployment of such models on embedded systems for real-time applications. • Description: The proposed system integrates AI/ML-driven noise suppression with adaptive filtering to create a robust ANC pipeline. The development begins with dataset generation, where clean speech data is combined with curated defence noise datasets (gunshots, drones, artillery, vehicle engines, wind, etc.) at varying SNR levels. This synthetic data generation ensures coverage of both stationary and impulsive noise scenarios. The training pipeline involves transforming audio into time-frequency representations (e.g., STFT spectrograms) or directly using raw waveform inputs. Models process both full-band and sub-band features to capture global and local dependencies. while its also operates in the complex domain to preserve phase information. Training is performed using loss functions such as SI-SNR, L1/L2 loss, and perceptual loss, with evaluation metrics including SNR, STOI, and PESQ. Data augmentation techniques (random noise mixing, reverberation, clipping) are applied to improve generalization. During inference, the trained model processes incoming noisy audio in real time, estimating a mask or directly reconstructing enhanced speech. The system can optionally include a lightweight adaptive filter (e.g., LMS) for residual noise suppression. For prototype demonstration, the trained model is deployed on embedded/edge hardware such as DSPs or AI-enabled SoCs (e.g., NVIDIA Jetson AGX Orin 64GB Developer Kit or similar platforms). Optimization techniques like quantization, pruning, and ONNX / TensorRT conversion are applied to meet latency and power constraints. The system is integrated with microphones (primary + reference) and headphones/communication units to validate real-time ANC performance in practical environments • Expected Solution: The final solution is a hybrid AI-driven ANC system capable of operating in real-time and handling diverse noise environments, including impulsive and highly dynamic defence scenarios. It should include: • A scalable dataset pipeline for generating realistic noisy-clean speech pairs • A state-of-the-art AI/ML model trained for robust noise suppression • A training framework with optimized hyper-parameters and perceptual loss functions • A real-time inference engine deployable on edge hardware • A prototype system demonstrating live noise cancellation using microphones / headset integration The system is expected to achieve significant performance improvements, targeting SNR > 15 dB, STOI > 0.85, and PESQ > 2.5, while maintaining low latency suitable for real-time communication. This solution will enable reliable and intelligible communication in defence, aerospace, and high-noise industrial environments.