Bleeck - Designing better hearing aids using physiologically inspired speech enhancement

Staff

Lead researcher

Professor Stefan Bleeck

Head of Department

Research interests

The aim of my work is to understand how we hear sound and to use this knowledge to create bio-inspired solutions to enhance speech communication.
I have continuously worked on various aspects of hearing research and technology and have been principal investigator on various research grants (EU, EPSRCS, etc) with a value of more than £2M. I am team leader with an internationally recognised research programme to develop devices that help normal hearing and hearing-impaired people to communicate better in noise. Methodologies include brainstem physiology, neuronal simulations, deep learing, psychophysics, pupil tracking and other physiological measurements.

Email: s.bleeck@soton.ac.uk

Other researchers

Professor Thomas Blumensath

Professor

Research interests

I develop and study advanced algorithms that can solve challenging inverse problems by efficiently exploiting complex prior information. Using techniques from mathematics, statistics and machine learning, my work concentrates primarily on problems in x-ray tomographic image reconstruction and modelling.
I work closely with state-of-the-art imaging facilities (µ-VIS, the National Research Facility in Lab-based XCT, the UK’s synchrotron facility at the Diamond Light Source, and ISIS neutron imaging beamline) to find practical solutions to a range of important scientific problems from plant science to manufacturing.
My research interests cover areas such as: Theoretical and computational methods for Signal and Image Processing (Machine Learning, Compressed Sensing, Statistical Signal and Image Processing, Quantum Computing, Inverse Problems, Optimisation, X-ray Tomographic Imaging); Advanced tomographic imaging strategies: (limited angle tomography and laminography, Spectral X-ray imaging, Stereo and extreme limited view tomography); Efficient computational methods for tomographic reconstruction, including GPU acceleration, distributed computation and advanced optimisation strategies, Constrained optimisation for ill-conditioned and underdetermined tomographic inverse problems, Applications of X-ray tomography to the inspection of manufactured components, Multimodal tomographic imaging

Email: thomas.blumensath@soton.ac.uk

Dr Matthew Wright

Professorial Fellow (Education)

Research interests

Musical instrument acoustics
Thermoviscous acoustics
Computer-enhanced learning

Email: mcmw@soton.ac.uk

Collaborating research institutes, centres and groups

Acoustics Group

Our group’s research topics range from the protection of marine mammals to the medical use of ultrasonics and the environmental effects of aircraft noise.