In many distant speech acquisition scenarios, such as hands-free telephony or teleconferencing, the desired speech signal is corrupted by noise and reverberation. This degrades both the speech quality and intelligibility, making communication difficult or even impossible. Speech enhancement techniques seek to mitigate these effects and extract the desired speech signal. This objective is commonly achieved through the use of microphone arrays, which take advantage of the spatial properties of the sound field in order to reduce noise and reverberation. Spherical microphone arrays, where the microphones are arranged in a spherical configuration, usually mounted on a rigid baffle, are able to analyze the sound field in three dimensions; the captured sound field can then be efficiently described in the spherical harmonic domain (SHD). In this thesis, a number of novel spherical array processing algorithms are proposed, based in the SHD. In ...

Spatial hearing for human listeners is based on the interaural as well as on the monaural analysis of the signals arriving at both ears, enabling the listeners to assign certain spatial components to these signals. This spatial aspect gets lost when the signals are reproduced via headphones without considering the acoustical influence of the head and torso, i.e. head-related transfer function (HRTFs). A common procedure to take into account spatial aspects in a binaural reproduction is to use so-called artificial heads. Artificial heads are replicas of a human head and torso with average anthropometric geometries and built-in microphones in the ears. Although, the signals recorded with artificial heads contain relevant spatial aspects, binaural recordings using artificial heads often suffer from front-back confusions and the perception of the sound source being inside the head (internalization). These shortcomings can be attributed to ...

The field of Life Science Engineering (LSE) is rapidly expanding and predicted to grow strongly in the next decades. It covers areas of food and medical research, plant and pests’ research, and environmental research. In each research area, engineers try to find equations that model a certain life science problem. Once found, they research different numerical techniques to solve for the unknown variables of these equations. Afterwards, solution improvement is examined by adopting more accurate conventional techniques, or developing novel algorithms. In particular, signal and image processing techniques are widely used to solve those LSE problems require pattern recognition. However, due to the continuous evolution of the life science problems and their natures, these solution techniques can not cover all aspects, and therefore demanding further enhancement and improvement. The thesis presents numerical algorithms of digital signal and image processing to ...

Sound source localization algorithms have a long research history in the field of digital signal processing. Many common applications like intelligent personal assistants, teleconferencing systems and methods for technical diagnosis in acoustics require an accurate localization of sound sources in the environment. However, dynamic environments entail a particular challenge for these systems. For instance, voice controlled smart home applications, where the speaker, as well as potential noise sources, are moving within the room, are a typical example of dynamic environments. Classical sound source localization systems only have limited capabilities to deal with dynamic acoustic scenarios. In this thesis, three novel approaches to sound source localization that extend existing classical methods will be presented. The first system is proposed in the context of audiovisual source localization. Determining the position of sound sources in adverse acoustic conditions can be improved by including ...

Determining the geometry of an acoustic enclosure using microphone arrays has become an active area of research. Knowledge gained about the acoustic environment, such as the location of reflectors, can be advantageous for applications such as sound source localization, dereverberation and adaptive echo cancellation by assisting in tracking environment changes and helping the initialization of such algorithms. A methodology to blindly infer the geometry of an acoustic enclosure by estimating the location of reflective surfaces based on acoustic measurements using an arbitrary array geometry is developed and analyzed. The starting point of this work considers a geometric constraint, valid both in two and three-dimensions, that converts time-of-arrival and time-difference-of-arrival information into elliptical constraints about the location of reflectors. Multiple constraints are combined to yield the line or plane parameters of the reflectors by minimizing a specific cost function in the ...

The advent of multi-microphone setups on a plethora of commercial devices in recent years has generated a newfound interest in the development of robust microphone array signal processing methods. These methods are generally used to either estimate parameters associated with acoustic scene or to extract signal(s) of interest. In most practical scenarios, the sources are located in the far-field of a microphone array where the main spatial information of interest is the direction-of-arrival (DOA) of the plane waves originating from the source positions. The focus of this thesis is to incorporate robustness against either lack of or imperfect/erroneous information regarding the DOAs of the sound sources within a microphone array signal processing framework. The DOAs of sound sources is by itself important information, however, it is most often used as a parameter for a subsequent processing method. One of the ...

The interest in the field of speech enhancement emerges from the increased usage of digital speech processing applications like mobile telephony, digital hearing aids and human-machine communication systems in our daily life. The trend to make these applications mobile increases the variety of potential sources for quality degradation. Speech enhancement methods can be used to increase the quality of these speech processing devices and make them more robust under noisy conditions. The name "speech enhancement" refers to a large group of methods that are all meant to improve certain quality aspects of these devices. Examples of speech enhancement algorithms are echo control, bandwidth extension, packet loss concealment and noise reduction. In this thesis we focus on single-microphone additive noise reduction and aim at methods that work in the discrete Fourier transform (DFT) domain. The main objective of the presented research ...

In the modern world, we are increasingly surrounded by computation devices with communication links and one or more microphones. Such devices are, for example, smartphones, tablets, laptops or hearing aids. These devices can work together as nodes in an acoustic sensor network (ASN). Such networks are a growing platform that opens the possibility for many practical applications. ASN based speech enhancement, source localization, and event detection can be applied for teleconferencing, camera control, automation, or assisted living. For this kind of applications, the awareness of auditory objects and their spatial positioning are key properties. In order to provide these two kinds of information, novel methods have been developed in this thesis. Information on the type of auditory objects is provided by a novel real-time sound classification method. Information on the position of human speakers is provided by a novel localization ...

Never before has speech been captured as often by electronic devices equipped with one or multiple microphones, serving a variety of applications. It is the key aspect in digital telephony, hearing devices, and voice-driven human-to-machine interaction. When speech is recorded, the microphones also capture a variety of further, undesired sound components due to adverse acoustic conditions. Interfering speech, background noise and reverberation, i.e. the persistence of sound in a room after excitation caused by a multitude of reflections on the room enclosure, are detrimental to the quality and intelligibility of target speech as well as the performance of automatic speech recognition. Hence, speech enhancement aiming at estimating the early target-speech component, which contains the direct component and early reflections, is crucial to nearly all speech-related applications presently available. In this thesis, we compare, propose and evaluate existing and novel approaches ...

In modern devices which provide hands-free speech capturing functionality, such as hands-free communication kits and voice-controlled devices, the received speech signal at the microphones is corrupted by background noise, interfering speech signals, and room reverberation. In many practical situations, the microphones are not necessarily located near the desired source, and hence, the ratio of the desired speech power to the power of the background noise, the interfering speech, and the reverberation at the microphones can be very low, often around or even below 0 dB. In such situations, the comfort of human-to-human communication, as well as the accuracy of automatic speech recognisers for voice-controlled applications can be signi cantly degraded. Therefore, e ffective speech enhancement algorithms are required to process the microphone signals before transmitting them to the far-end side for communication, or before feeding them into a speech recognition ...

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, ...

Hearing loss can be caused by many factors, e.g., daily exposure to excessive noise in the work environment and listening to loud music. Another important reason can be age-related, i.e., the slow loss of hearing that occurs as people get older. In general hearing impaired people suffer from a frequency-dependent hearing loss and from a reduced dynamic range between the hearing threshold and the uncomfortable level. This means that the uncomfortable level for normal hearing and hearing impaired people suffering from so called sensorineural hearing loss remains the same but the hearing threshold and the sensitivity to soft sounds are shifted as a result of the hearing loss. To compensate for this kind of hearing loss the hearing aid should include a frequency-dependent and a level-dependent gain. The corresponding digital signal processing (DSP) algorithm is referred to as dynamic range ...

A speech signal captured by multiple microphones is often subject to a reduced intelligibility and quality due to the presence of noise and room acoustic interferences. Multi-microphone speech enhancement systems therefore aim at the suppression or cancellation of such undesired signals without substantial distortion of the speech signal. A fundamental aspect to the design of several multi-microphone speech enhancement systems is that of the spatial information which relates each microphone signal to the desired speech source. This spatial information is unknown in practice and has to be somehow estimated. Under certain conditions, however, the estimated spatial information can be inaccurate, which subsequently degrades the performance of a multi-microphone speech enhancement system. This doctoral dissertation is focused on the development and evaluation of acoustic signal processing algorithms in order to address this issue. Specifically, as opposed to conventional means of estimating ...

In many speech communication applications, such as hands-free telephony and hearing aids, the microphones are located at a distance from the speaker. Therefore, in addition to the desired speech signal, the microphone signals typically contain undesired reverberation and noise, caused by acoustic reflections and undesired sound sources. Since these disturbances tend to degrade the quality of speech communication, decrease speech intelligibility and negatively affect speech recognition, efficient dereverberation and denoising methods are required. This thesis deals with blind dereverberation methods, not requiring any knowledge about the room impulse responses between the speaker and the microphones. More specifically, we propose a general framework for blind speech dereverberation based on multi-channel linear prediction (MCLP) and exploiting sparsity of the speech signal in the time-frequency domain.

Sound source separation refers to the task of estimating the signals produced by individual sound sources from a complex acoustic mixture. It has several applications, since monophonic signals can be processed more efficiently and flexibly than polyphonic mixtures. This thesis deals with the separation of monaural, or, one-channel music recordings. We concentrate on separation methods, where the sources to be separated are not known beforehand. Instead, the separation is enabled by utilizing the common properties of real-world sound sources, which are their continuity, sparseness, and repetition in time and frequency, and their harmonic spectral structures. One of the separation approaches taken here use unsupervised learning and the other uses model-based inference based on sinusoidal modeling. Most of the existing unsupervised separation algorithms are based on a linear instantaneous signal model, where each frame of the input mixture signal is modeled ...