Most cognitive processes in the brain are reflected through several aspects simultaneously, allowing us to observe the same process from different biological phenomena. The diverse nature of these biological processes suggests that a better understanding of cerebral activity may be achieved through multimodal measurements. One of the possible multimodal brain recording settings is the combination…
In the last few years Homeland Security (HS) has gained a considerable interest in the research community. From a scientific point of view, it is a difficult task to provide a definition of this research area and to exactly draw up its boundaries. In fact, when we talk about the security and the surveillance, several…
Advanced mobile communication systems are characterized by a dense deployment of different types of wireless access points. Since these systems are primarily limited by interference, multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) techniques as well as coordinated transmission and detection schemes are necessary to mitigate this limitation. Thus, mobile communication systems become more complex which requires that also the…
The topic of this thesis is the enhancement of noisy, periodic signals with application to speech signals. Generally speaking, enhancement methods can be divided into signal- and noise-driven methods. In this thesis, we focus on the signal-driven approach by employing relevant signal parameters for the enhancement of periodic signals. The enhancement problem consists of two…
Modern speech communications are evolving towards a new direction which involves users in a more perceptive way. That is the immersive experience, which may be considered as the ?last mile? problem of telecommunications. One of the main feature of immersive communications is the distant-talking, i.e. the hands-free (in the broad sense) speech communications without bodyworn…
This thesis presents a new approach to the problem of localizing and tracking multiple acoustic sources using a microphone array. The use of microphone arrays offers enhancements of speech signals recorded in meeting rooms and office spaces. A common solution for speech enhancement in realistic environments with ambient noise and multi-path propagation is the application…
Multiple pitch tracking of speech is an important task for the segregation of multiple speakers in a single-channel recording. In this thesis, a probabilistic model-based approach for estimation and tracking of multiple pitch trajectories is proposed. A probabilistic model that captures pitch-dependent characteristics of the single-speaker short-time spectrum is obtained a priori from clean speech…
Chapter 2 contains a short introduction to the fundamentals of compressed sensing theory, which is the larger context of this thesis. We start with introducing the key concepts of sparsity and sparse representations of signals. We discuss the central problem of compressed sensing, i.e. how to adequately recover sparse signals from a small number of…
Epilepsy is one of the most common neurological diseases, especially in children. And although the majority of patients can be treated through medication or surgery (70%-75% a significant group of patients cannot be treated. For this latter group of patients it is advisable to follow the evolution of the disease. This can be done through…
Speech signals acquired, transmitted or stored in non-ideal conditions are often degraded by one or more effects including, for example, additive noise. These degradations alter the signal properties in a manner that deteriorates the intelligibility or quality of the speech signal. In the law enforcement context such degradations are commonplace due to the limitations in…
