Recent advances in computer technology and speech and language processing have made possible that some new ways of person-machine communication and computer assistance to human activities start to appear feasible. Concretely, the interest on the development of new challenging applications in indoor environments equipped with multiple multimodal sensors, also known as smart-rooms, has considerably grown. In general, it is well-known that the quality of speech signals captured by microphones that can be located several meters away from the speakers is severely distorted by acoustic noise and room reverberation. In the context of the development of hands-free speech applications in smart-room environments, the use of obtrusive sensors like close-talking microphones is usually not allowed, and consequently, speech technologies must operate on the basis of distant-talking recordings. In such conditions, speech technologies that usually perform reasonably well in free of noise and ...

In multiuser ultra-wideband (UWB) systems, a large number of multipath components (MPCs) are introduced by the channel. One of the main challenges for the receiver is to effectively suppress the interference with affordable complexity. In this thesis, we focus on the linear adaptive interference suppression algorithms for the direct-sequence ultrawideband (DS-UWB) systems in both time-domain and frequency-domain. In the time-domain, symbol by symbol transmission multiuser DS-UWB systems are considered. We first investigate a generic reduced-rank scheme based on the concept of joint and iterative optimization (JIO) that jointly optimizes a projection vector and a reduced-rank filter by using the minimum mean-squared error (MMSE) criterion. A low-complexity scheme, named Switched Approximations of Adaptive Basis Functions (SAABF), is proposed as a modification of the generic scheme, in which the complexity reduction is achieved by using a multi-branch framework to simplify the structure ...

This Dissertation addresses the synchronization problem using an array of antennas in the general framework of Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS) receivers. Positioning systems are based on time delay and frequency-shift estimation of the incoming signals in the receiver side, in order to compute the user's location. Sources of accuracy degradation in satellite-based navigation systems are well-known, and their mitigation has deserved the attention of a number of researchers in latter times. While atmospheric-dependant sources (delays that depend on the ionosphere and troposphere conditions) can be greatly mitigated by differential systems external to the receiver's operation, the multipath effect is location-dependant and remains as the most important cause of accuracy degradation in time delay estimation, and consequently in position estimation, becoming a signal processing challenge. Traditional approaches to time delay estimation are often embodied in a communication systems framework. Indeed, ...

Reverberation is the sum of reflected sound waves and is present in any conventional room. Speech communication devices such as mobile phones in hands-free mode, tablets, smart TVs, teleconferencing systems, hearing aids, voice-controlled systems, etc. use one or more microphones to pick up the desired speech signals. When the microphones are not in the proximity of the desired source, strong reverberation and noise can degrade the signal quality at the microphones and can impair the intelligibility and the performance of automatic speech recognizers. Therefore, it is a highly demanded task to process the microphone signals such that reverberation and noise are reduced. The process of reducing or removing reverberation from recorded signals is called dereverberation. As dereverberation is usually a completely blind problem, where the only available information are the microphone signals, and as the acoustic scenario can be non-stationary, ...

The use of low-cost CubeSats in the context of satellite formation flying appears favourable due to their small size, relatively low launch cost, short development cycle and utilisation of commercial off the shelf components. However, the task of managing complex formations using a large number of satellites in Earth orbit is not a trivial one, and is further exacerbated by low-power and processing constraints in CubeSats. With this in mind, a Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) based system has been developed to provide next generation on-board computing capability. The features and functionality provided by this on-board computer, as well as the steps taken to ensure reliability, including design processes and mitigation techniques are presented in this work and compared to state of the art technology. Coupling reliable formation flying capabilities with the possibility of producing complex patterns using spacecraft will ...

In the last decades the world has experienced a massive growth in the demand for wireless services. The recent popularity of hand-held devices with data exchange capabilities over wireless networks, such as smartphones and tablets, increased the wireless data traffic even further. This trend is not expected to cease in the foreseeable future. In fact, it is expected to accelerate as everyday apparatus unrelated with data communications, such as vehicles or household devices, are foreseen to be equipped with wireless communication capabilities. Further, the next generation wireless networks should be designed such that they have increased spectral and energy efficiency, provide uniformly good service to all of the accommodated users and handle many more devices simultaneously. Massive multiple-input multiple-output (Massive MIMO) systems, also termed as large-scale MIMO, very large MIMO or full-dimension MIMO, have recently been proposed as a candidate ...

This thesis deals with the synchronization of one or several replicas of a known signal received in a scenario with multipath propagation and directional interference. A connecting theme along this work is the systematic application of the maximum likelihood (ML) principle together with a signal model in which the spatial signatures are unstructured and the noise term is Gaussian- distributed with an unknown correlation matrix. This last assumption is key in obtaining estimators that are capable of mitigating the disturbing signals that exhibit a certain structure, and this is achieved without resorting to the estimation of the parameters of those signals. On the other hand, the assumption of unstructured spatial signatures is interesting from a practical standpoint and facilitates the estimation problem since the estimates of these signatures can be obtained in closed form. This constitutes a first step towards ...

In an automotive environment, quality of speech communication using a hands-free equipment is often deteriorated by interfering car noise. In order to preserve the speech signal without car noise, a multichannel speech enhancement system including a beamformer and a post-filter can be applied. Since employing a beamformer alone is insufficient to substantially reducing the level of car noise, a post-filter has to be applied to provide further noise reduction, especially at low frequencies. In this thesis, two novel post-filter designs along with their optimization for different driving conditions are presented. The first post-filter design utilizes an adaptive smoothing factor for the power spectral density estimation as well as a hybrid noise coherence function. The hybrid noise coherence function is a mixture of the diffuse and the measured noise coherence functions for a specific driving condition. The second post-filter design applies ...

This Dissertation addresses the signal acquisition problem using antenna arrays in the general framework of Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS) receivers. GNSSs provide the necessary infrastructures for a myriad of applications and services that demand a robust and accurate positioning service. GNSS ranging signals are received with very low signal-to-noise ratio. Despite that the GNSS CDMA modulation offers limited protection against Radio Frequency Interferences (RFI), an interference that exceeds the processing gain can easily degrade receivers' performance or even deny completely the GNSS service. A growing concern of this problem has appeared in recent times. A single-antenna receiver can make use of time and frequency diversity to mitigate interferences, even though the performance of these techniques is compromised in the presence of wideband interferences. Antenna arrays receivers can benefit from spatial-domain processing, and thus mitigate the effects of interfering signals. ...

In this thesis novel implementation approaches for standardized and non-standardized ultra wide-band (UWB) systems are presented. These implementation approaches include signal processing algorithms to achieve processing of UWB signals in transceiver front-ends and in digital back-ends. A parallelization of the transceiver in the frequency-domain has been achieved with hybrid filterbank transceivers. The standardized MB-OFDM signaling scheme allows par- allelization in the frequency domain by distributing the orthogonal multicarrier modulation onto multiple units. Furthermore, the channel’s response to wideband signals has been parallelized in the frequency domain and the effects of the parallelization have been investi- gated. Slight performance decreases are observed, where the limiting effects are truncated sidelobes and filter mismatches in analog front-ends. Measures for the performance loss have been defined. For UWB signal generation, a novel broadband signal generation approach is presented. For that purpose, multiple digital-to-analog converters ...

Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) is an important diagnostic tool for imaging soft tissue without the use of ionizing radiation. Moreover, through advanced signal processing, MRI can provide more than just anatomical information, such as estimates of tissue-specific physical properties. Signal processing lies at the very core of the MRI process, which involves input design, information encoding, image reconstruction, and advanced filtering. Based on signal modeling and estimation, it is possible to further improve the images, reduce artifacts, mitigate noise, and obtain quantitative tissue information. In quantitative MRI, different physical quantities are estimated from a set of collected images. The optimization problems solved are typically nonlinear, and require intelligent and application-specific algorithms to avoid suboptimal local minima. This thesis presents several methods for efficiently solving different parameter estimation problems in MRI, such as multi-component T2 relaxometry, temporal phase correction of complex-valued ...

This thesis is concerned with the use of multiple antenna elements in wireless communication over frequency non-selective radio channels. Both measurement results and theoretical analysis are presented. New transmit strategies are derived and compared to existing transmit strategies, such as beamforming and space time block coding (STBC). It is found that the best transmission algorithm is largely dependent on the channel characteristics, such as the number of transmit and receive antennas and the existence of a line of sight component. Rayleigh fading multiple input multiple output (MIMO) channels are studied using an eigenvalue analysis and exact expressions for the bit error rates and outage capacities for beamforming and STBC is found. In general are MIMO fading channels correlated and there exists a mutual coupling between antenna elements. These findings are supported by indoor MIMO measurements. It is found that the ...

The improvement of speech intelligibility is a traditional problem which still remains open and unsolved. The recent boom of applications such as hands-free communi- cations or automatic speech recognition systems and the ever-increasing demands of the hearing-impaired community have given a definitive impulse to the research in this area. This PhD thesis is focused on speech enhancement for audiological applications. Most of the research conducted in this thesis has been focused on the improvement of speech intelligibility in hearing aids, considering the variety of restrictions and limitations imposed by this type of devices. The combination of source separation techniques and spatial filtering with machine learning and evolutionary computation has originated novel and interesting algorithms which are included in this thesis. The thesis is divided in two main parts. The first one contains a preliminary study of the problem and a ...

Since several years, multi-antenna systems are foreseen as a potential solution for increasing the throughput of future wireless communication systems. The aim of this thesis is to study and to improve the transmitter and receiver's techniques of these MIMO (Multiple Input Multiple Output) systems in the context of a multi-carrier transmission. On the one hand, the OFDM (Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplex) modulation, which transform a frequency selective channel into multiple non frequency selective channels, is particularly well adapted to the conception of MIMO receivers with low complexity. On the other hand, two techniques allowing to improve the exploitation of frequential and/or temporal diversities are associated with OFDM, namely linear precoding (LP-OFDM) and CDMA in a MC-CDMA (Multicarrier Code division Multiplex Access) scheme. We have associated LP-OFDM and MC-CDMA with two MIMO techniques which require no channel state information at the ...

Optimizing the performance of digital imaging systems with respect to the capture, display, storage and transmission of visual information represents one of the biggest challenges in the field of image and video processing. Taking into account the way humans perceive visual information can be greatly beneficial for this task. To achieve this, it is necessary to understand and model the human visual system, which is also the principal goal of this thesis. Computational models for different aspects of the visual system are developed, which can be used in a wide variety of image and video processing applications. The proposed models and metrics are shown to be consistent with human perception. The focus of this work is visual quality assessment. A perceptual distortion metric (PDM) for the evaluation of video quality is presented. It is based on a model of the ...