Colloquium: Blind multi-microphone noise reduction and dereverberation algorithms for speech communication applications
18 November 2019
Despite the progress in speech enhancement algorithms, speech understanding in adverse acoustic environments with background noise, competing speakers and reverberation is still a major challenge in many speech communication applications.
Despite the progress in speech enhancement algorithms, speech understanding in adverse acoustic environments with background noise, competing speakers and reverberation is still a major challenge in many speech communication applications.
In this presentation, some recent advances in blind multi-microphone noise reduction and dereverberation algorithms will be presented, with a particular focus on the multi-channel Wiener filter (MWF). First, several methods to jointly estimate all required time-varying quantities, i.e. the relative transfer functions of the target speaker and the power spectral densities of the target speaker, the reverberation and the noise, will be presented. Second, speech enhancement algorithms for binaural hearing devices will be discussed, where the objective is not only to selectively extract the target speaker and suppress background noise and reverberation, but also to preserve the auditory impression of the complete acoustic scene. Aiming at preserving the binaural cues of all sound sources while not degrading the noise reduction performance, different extensions of the binaural MWF will be presented, both for diffuse noise as well as for interfering sources. Third, it will be shown how such algorithms can be used in acoustic sensor networks, exploiting the spatial distribution of the microphones. Evaluation results will be presented in terms of objective performance measures as well as subjective listening scores for speech intelligibility and spatial quality.
Prof. Dr. Simon Doclo received the M.Sc. degree in electrical engineering and the Ph.D. degree in applied sciences from KU Leuven, Belgium, in 1997 and 2003. From 2003 to 2007 he was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Electrical Engineering Department (KU Leuven) and the Cognitive Systems Laboratory (McMaster University, Canada). From 2007 to 2009 he was a Principal Scientist with NXP Semiconductors in Leuven, Belgium. Since 2009 he is the head of the Signal Processing Group at the University of Oldenburg, Germany, and scientific advisor of the Fraunhofer Institute for Digital Media Technology. His research activities center around acoustical and biomedical signal processing, more specifically microphone array processing, speech enhancement, active noise control, auditory attention decoding and hearing aid processing.
Prof. Doclo received several awards, among which the EURASIP Signal Processing Best Paper Award in 2003, the IEEE Signal Processing Society 2008 Best Paper Award and the best paper award of the Information Technology Society (ITG) in 2019. He is member of the IEEE Signal Processing Society Technical Committee on Audio and Acoustic Signal Processing, the EURASIP Special Area Team on Acoustic, Speech and Music Signal Processing and the EAA Technical Committee on Audio Signal Processing. Prof. Doclo was Technical Program Chair of the IEEE Workshop on Applications of Signal Processing to Audio and Acoustics (WASPAA) in 2013 and Chair of the ITG Conference on Speech Communication in 2018. In addition, he served as guest editor for several special issues (IEEE Signal Processing Magazine, Elsevier Signal Processing) and is associate editor for IEEE/ACM Transactions on Audio, Speech and Language Processing and EURASIP Journal on Advances in Signal Processing.
Monday, 18 November 2019, 17:15, Lecture Hall B-201, Informatikum, Stellingen
Speaker: Simon Doclo, University of Oldenburg