Tuesday, September 24, 2013, 4:00 to 5:00, room F107, INRIA Montbonnot
by Sharon Gannot, Bar-Ilan University, Israel
Abstract. A major challenge in modern acoustic communication systems is the acquisition of a sound of interest. In the last decade, the use of multiple microphones has shown to provide significant advantages compared to the use of a single microphone, especially in adverse acoustic conditions, encountered in reverberant and noisy environments. We will start our talk by briefly reviewing room acoustics and the different sound fields that are mandatory for understanding the field of microphone array processing. The main part of the talk will be dedicated to spatial processors (beamformers) based on the linearly constrained minimum variance (LCMV) criterion, and its special case, the minimum variance distortionless (MVDR) beamformer. The implementation of the LCMV beamformer in the short-time Fourier transform (STFT) domain and its structuring as a generalized sidelobe canceller (GSC) facilitate the application of the presented algorithms to speech signals in real acoustic environments. We will continue by exploring both blind and training-assisted estimation procedures that are necessary for implementing the various blocks of these beamformers. We will conclude our survey by a short introduction to the emerging field of distributed microphone arrays and to the new and fascinating algorithmic challenges that arise from these ad hoc architectures. The talk will be accompanied by audio samples demonstrating the performance of the surveyed methods.
Short bio. Sharon Gannot received his B.Sc. degree (summa cum laude) from the Technion– Israel Institute of Technology, Haifa, Israel in 1986 and the M.Sc. (cum laude) and Ph.D. degrees from Tel-Aviv University, Israel in 1995 and 2000 respectively, all in Electrical Engineering. In 2001 he held a post-doctoral position at the department of Electrical Engineering (ESAT-SISTA) at K.U.Leuven, Belgium. From 2002 to 2003 he held a research and teaching position at the Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, Haifa, Israel. Currently, he is an Associate Professor at the Faculty of Engineering, Bar-Ilan University, Israel, where he is heading the Speech and Signal Processing laboratory. Prof. Gannot is the recipient of Bar-Ilan University outstanding lecturer award for 2010. Prof. Gannot is currently an Area Chair of the IEEE Transactions on Speech, Audio and Language Processing, where he also served as an Associate Editor in 2010-2013. In 2003-2012, he served as an Associate Editor of the EURASIP Journal of Advances in Signal Processing, and as an Editor of two special issues on Multi-microphone Speech Processing of the same journal. He has also served as a Guest Editor of ELSEVIER Speech Communication journal and currently as a Guest Editor of a special issue on distributed microphone arrays. Prof. Gannot is also serving as a reviewer of many IEEE journals and conferences. Prof. Gannot is a member of the Audio and Acoustic Signal Processing (AASP) technical committee of the IEEE since Jan., 2010. He is also a member of the Technical and Steering committee of the International Workshop on Acoustic Signal Enhancement (IWAENC) since 2005 and was the general co-chair of IWAENC held at Tel-Aviv, Israel in August 2010. Prof. Gannot will serve as the general co-chair of the IEEE Workshop on Applications of Signal Processing to Audio and Acoustics (WASPAA) in 2013. Prof. Gannot was selected to present a tutorial session at ICASSP 2012, EUSIPCO 2012, ICASSP 2013 and EUSIPCO 2013.
