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The University of Southampton
Engineering

Acoustic Signal Processing and Applications to Speech Dereverberation Seminar

Time:
16:00
Date:
30 April 2013
Venue:
Building 13 room 3017

For more information regarding this seminar, please email Natasha Webb at N.Webb@soton.ac.uk .

Event details

ISVR Engineering Research Seminar series

The impact of acoustic propagation on speech signals captured at various points in space by microphones can be to degrade speech quality and speech intelligibility and to reduce the accuracy of automatic speech recognition. The degrading effects include importantly the addition of noise and the addition of reverberation. Example applications where such degradations are problematic include interactive TV, SkypeTV, in-car communications, meeting transcription systems and conferencing systems.

In this talk I shall discuss some multichannel signal processing approaches to address the problem of reverberation in speech. In general, speech dereverberation can be achieved by first performing multichannel blind estimation of the acoustic propagation channel and then processing the reverberant signal with a multichannel equalizer corresponding to the inverse of the channel. This approach to dereverberation will be reviewed and some of the practical difficulties highlighted. Current and new approaches for the approximate inversion of the acoustic channel will be described.

Speaker information

Patrick Naylor , Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Imperial College London. Patrick Naylor received the BEng degree in Electronic and Electrical Engineering from the University of Sheffield, U.K., in 1986 and the PhD degree from Imperial College London, U.K., in 1990. Since 1990 he has been a member of academic staff in the Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering at Imperial College London. His research interests are in the areas of speech, audio and acoustic signal processing. He has worked in audio particular on adaptive signal processing and speech processing and has recently produced the first research textbook on dereverberation. Important topics in his work are microphone array signal processing, blind multichannel acoustic system identification and equalization, single and multi-channel speech enhancement and speech production modelling with particular focus on the analysis of the voice source signal. He is a director of the UK Centre for Law Enforcement Audio Research, a government funded centre tasked to undertake advanced research and to support the law enforcement agencies. In addition to his academic research, he enjoys several fruitful links with industry in the UK, USA.

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