A complex physical system like the human brain can only be comprehended by the use of a combination of various medical imaging techniques, each of which shed light on only a specific aspect of the neural processes that take place beneath the skull. Electroencephalography (EEG) and functional magnetic resonance (fMRI) are two such modalities, which…
This thesis focuses on the design of various automatic signal processing algorithms to extract information from physiological signals of preterm infants. Overall, the aim was to improve the neurodevelopmental outcome of the neonate. More specifically, three main research objectives were carried out. The first objective was to describe the maturation of neonates during their stay…
Worldwide approximately 11% of the babies are born before 37 weeks of gestation. The survival rates of these prematurely born infants have steadily increased during the last decades as a result of the technical and medical progress in the neonatal intensive care units (NICUs). The focus of the NICUs has therefore gradually evolved from increasing…
Identifying the target speaker in hearing aid applications is an essential ingredient to improve speech intelligibility. Although several speech enhancement algorithms are available to reduce background noise or to perform source separation in multi-speaker scenarios, their performance depends on correctly identifying the target speaker to be enhanced. Recent advances in electroencephalography (EEG) have shown that…
In many fields, such as linear algebra, computational geometry, combinatorial optimization, analytical chemistry and geoscience, nonnegativity of the solution is required, which is either due to the fact that the data is physically nonnegative, or that the mathematical modeling of the problem requires nonnegativity. Image and audio processing are two examples for which the data…
Multiple antennas at the base station side can be used to enhance the spectral efficiency and energy efficiency of the next generation wireless technologies. Indeed, massive multi-input multi-output (MIMO) is seen as one promising technology to bring the aforementioned benefits for fifth generation wireless standard, commonly known as 5G New Radio (5G NR). In this…
Multiple antennas at the base station side can be used to enhance the spectral efficiency and energy efficiency of the next generation wireless technologies. Indeed, massive multi-input multi-output (MIMO) is seen as one promising technology to bring the aforementioned benefits for fifth generation wireless standard, commonly known as 5G New Radio (5G NR). In this…
In order to meet the diverse requirements imposed by a massive number of applications, the fifth generation (5G) New Radio (NR) Physical Layer (PHY) is designed to provide a highly flexible framework. This flexibility is made possible through a scalable numerology. The term numerology refers to the PHY waveform parametrization and allows the use of…
The concept of fractional calculus has emerged as one of the most effective mathematical tools for improving the performance of electrical circuits and systems. By using this tool electronic filters, oscillators, integrators, differentiators, and several other signal processing circuits and systems are realized in fractional sense. Consequently, these systems are known as fractional-order systems, and…
Despite a lot of progress in speech separation, enhancement, and automatic speech recognition realistic meeting recognition is still fairly unsolved. Most research on speech separation either focuses on spectral cues to address single-channel recordings or spatial cues to separate multi-channel recordings and exclusively either rely on neural networks or probabilistic graphical models. Integrating a spatial…
