Advanced Speech-Audio Processing in Mobile Phones and Hearing Aids: Synergies and Distinctions

Add to your list(s) Download to your calendar using vCal

• Professor Peter Vary, RWTH Aachen University, Germany
• Tuesday 14 May 2013, 18:30-20:00
• Gabor Seminar Room, 611.

If you have a question about this talk, please contact Lauren E Noto.

Talk starts at 19.00, tea will be served from 18.30.

Mobile phones and modern hearing aids comprise advanced digital signal processing techniques as well as coding algorithms.

From a functional point of view, digital hearing devices and mobile phones are approaching each other. In both types of devices similar or partly even identical algorithms can be found such as echo, reverberation and feedback control, noise reduction, intelligibility enhancement, artificial bandwidth extension, and binaural processing with two or more microphones.

Actual hearing aids include digital audio receivers and transmitters not only for communication and entertainment but also for binaural directional processing. State-of-the-art mobile phones offer new speech-audio compression schemes for the emerging HD-telephone services and they are equipped with two (or more) microphones for the purpose of speech enhancement. Thus, it is not a too big step to realize hearing aid features as apps on smart phones. The further evolution might lead us to binaural mobile telephony, providing ambient and spatial information – a preferred solution for audio conferencing, for example.

Despite these relations, the signal conditions and the processing constraints are quite different, e.g., with respect to the coherence of signals, the complexity of algorithms, power consumption, and latency. Synergies and distinctions of the corresponding signal processing and coding algorithms will be discussed. Design constraints and solutions will be presented by examples.

Biography: Peter Vary was the leader of the winning research team (Philips, IBM ) which designed the GSM full-rate codec in 1988. Since 1990 the RWTH /IND group has a continuing tradition in contributing to international codec standards (GSM, UMTS ,ITU). Furthermore, the group made numerous original proposals in the field of digital speech transmission which have opened new directions of academic research and industrial applications: e.g., combined echo cancellation and noise reduction, psychoacoustic noise reduction, artificial bandwidth extension, soft decision source decoding, iterative source-channel decoding, and turbo decodulation.

This talk is part of the COMMSP Seminar series.

This talk is included in these lists:

• Andrea Picciau's list
• COMMSP & CP list
• COMMSP Seminar
• Featured talks
• Gabor Seminar Room, 611
• SAP Talks

Note that ex-directory lists are not shown.