“The Acoustic Signal Processing Challenge: Enabling Communication in Adverse Conditions”

Abstract:

With the broad proliferation of mobile communications we have become used to communicate in notoriously difficult acoustic scenarios. Ambient noise, reverberation, and echoes all contribute to a significantly degraded communication experience. Furthermore, the impact of these factors becomes significantly worse when participants suffer from a hearing loss. Nevertheless, voice and audio communication devices, such as smartphones, headsets and hearing instruments are frequently used in these adverse conditions and are expected to enable effortless communication.

This talk discusses challenges in audio signal processing as they are frequently encountered in difficult communication scenarios. While the design of algorithms is often inspired by high-level processing paradigms such as Auditory Scene Analysis (Bregman, 1990), the constraints of real-world applications and devices must also be taken into account. In many cases rather strict requirements result from the size of the device, the power budget, and the admissable processing latency. This talk will discuss examples and applications in the area of single- and multi-channel speech enhancement and will highlight recent developments and solutions to these tasks.

Biography:

Rainer Martin received the Dipl.-Ing. and Dr.-Ing. degrees from RWTH Aachen University, Aachen, Germany, in 1988 and 1996, respectively, and the M.S.E.E. degree from Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, in 1989. From 1996 to 2002, he was a Senior Research Engineer with the Institute of Communication Systems and Data Processing, RWTH Aachen University. From April 1998 to March 1999, he was on leave to the AT&T Speech and Image Processing Services Research Lab, Florham Park, NJ. From April 2002 until October 2003, he was a Professor of Digital Signal Processing at the Technische Universität Braunschweig, Braunschweig, Germany.

Since October 2003, he has been a Professor of Information Technology and Communication Acoustics at Ruhr-Universität Bochum, Bochum, Germany, and from October 2007 to September 2009 Dean of the Electrical Engineering and Information Sciences Department. His research interests are signal processing for voice communication systems, hearing instruments, and human–machine interfaces.

This event is organized in the framework of the COMET K project Advanced Audio Processing (http://www.comet-aap.at/), the COMET K project Acoustic Sensing and Design ASD, and it is sponsored by the Faculty of Electrical and Information Engineering.