CML Researchers win VDE ITG Award 2022

29 August 2022

Kristina Tesch and Timo Gerkmann from the Signal Processing (SP) research group of the Universität Hamburg received the 2022 VDE ITG award, which is the award of the Information Technology Society (ITG) of the VDE.

With the ITG award, the Informationstechnische Gesellschaft of the VDE annually honors outstanding scientific publications by its members in the field of information technology. Each award comes with a cash prize of 3,000 euros and a certificate, which is presented at an annual ceremony which this time will be held on November 22nd, 2022 in Berlin.

The award is given for the publication Kristina Tesch, Timo Gerkmann, "Nonlinear Spatial Filtering in Multichannel Speech Enhancement", IEEE/ACM Trans. Audio, Speech, Language Proc., Vol. 29, pp. 1795-1805, 2021.
[doi] [arxiv] [audio]

In this work, the usage of DNNs for joint nonlinear spatial-spectral filtering for speech enhancement to replace the traditional sequential processing chain of spatial and spectral filtering is motivated. By means of theoretical derivations and experimental analyses we show that a joint nonlinear spatial-spectral filter outperforms the traditional processing chain in non-Gaussian noise, and is capable of attenuating more interfering directional sources than the traditional setup. At the same time, we also show that in Gaussian noise the traditional setup is MMSE-optimal, i.e. cannot be outperformed by a joint spatial-spectral filter. Thus, we show that the choice of the filtering framework depends on the expected noise field and our work thus helps researchers and industry to decide if the development of joint nonlinear spatial-spectral filtering is worthwhile for the anticipated use-cases.

Conteact and Further information:
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