23 accepted papers
This paper introduces a new bilinear algorithm that combines distortionless response beamforming with weighted prediction error using the Kronecker product operator to improve speech signal quality in different acoustic environments. The algorithm utilizes recursive least squares cost functions and…
We recently introduced the Efficient User-centric Residual-Echo Suppression (E-URES) framework, which significantly reduces the floating-point operations per second (FLOPS) required during inference by 90% compared to the URES framework. The E-URES operates based on a user-operating point (UOP) defi…
Microphone array geometry plays a crucial role in array signal processing and beamforming. This paper presents an array geometry optimization approach for near-field beamforming. Considering a continuous region of interest, we aim to maximize the worst-case broadband directivity of the array while e…
Dereverberation, a process to mitigate or eliminate the reverberation effect, plays an important role in hands-free speech communication and human-machine interfaces. Tremendous efforts have been devoted to this problem and various methods have been developed over the last three decades. Those metho…
Machine learning and digital signal processing have been extensively used to enhance speech. However, methods to reduce early reflections in studio settings are usually related to the physical characteristics of the room. In this paper, we address the problem of early acoustic reflections in televis…
We propose a general framework for adaptation control using deep neural networks (NNs) and apply it to acoustic echo cancellation (AEC). First, the optimal step-size that controls the adaptation is derived offline by solving a constrained nonlinear optimization problem that minimizes the adaptive fi…
In this paper, we propose an incoherent design method of sparse broadband arrays that optimizes the number of sensors and their positions simultaneously. We introduce an iterative clustering procedure that merges different groups of sensors with a small distance, in terms of Bhattacharyya distance,…
Residual-echo suppression (RES) systems suppress the echo and preserve the speech from a mixture of the two. In hands-free speech communication, RES may also be addressed as a source separation (SS) or speech enhancement (SE) problem, where the echo can be manipulated as an interfering speech signal…
Null directions are important parameters for differential beamformers, which play an important role on the beamforming performance. In this paper, we investigate the performance of differential beamformers as a function of the null directions. We first derive the directivity factor (DF) as an explic…
While differential beamformers have been widely used in voice communication and human-machine speech interface systems to enhance speech signals of interest, how to design such beamformers that on the one hand can achieve the highest possible directivity factor (DF) and on the other hand are able to…
In this paper, we propose a residual echo suppression method using a UNet neural network that directly maps the outputs of a linear acoustic echo canceler to the desired signal in the spectral domain. This system embeds a design parameter that allows a tunable tradeoff between the desired-signal dis…
This paper studies the problem of designing square differential microphone arrays (SDMAs). It presents a multistage approach, which first divides an SDMA composed of M <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">2</sup> microphones into (M − 1) <sup…
Differential beamformers with concentric circular microphone arrays (CCMAs) are desirable for use in various applications since they can form frequency-invariant spatial responses, have better beam steering flexibility than linear arrays, and suffer less with beampattern irregularity and white noise…
This work proposes a practical fixed beamformer for a sparse concentric circular array (CCA) of microphones. Firstly, a method is proposed which enables the reduction of the number of microphones in a CCA based on the optimal placement of the microphones to maximize the directivity-factor (DF). Ther…
State-of-the-art deep-learning-based voice activity detectors (VADs) are often trained with anechoic data. However, real acoustic environments are generally reverberant, which causes the performance to significantly deteriorate. To mitigate this mismatch between training data and real data, we simul…
A common approach for acoustic source localization is based on finding the maximum of a spatial cost function, such as the steered response power (SRP) function. The shape of the SRP highly depends on the constellation of sensors within the array layout, and have a direct impact on the performance.…
Differential microphone arrays (DMAs), a class of welldesigned small-size arrays combined with differential beamforming, are very useful for processing broadband acoustic, audio, and speech signals in a wide range of applications. However, most efforts in the literature so far have been devoted to l…
This paper proposes a method for the design of flexible Kronecker product beamformers based on the decomposition of the steering vector of a physical array as a Kronecker product of steering vectors of two smaller virtual arrays. With this decomposition, the global beamforming filter is designed by…
Despite attracting significant research efforts, the problem of source localization in noisy and reverberant environments remains challenging. Novel learning-based methods attempt to solve the problem by modelling the acoustic environment from the observed data. Typically, appropriate feature vector…
Beamforming using microphone arrays has been widely used for enhancing speech signals of interest and suppressing noise and interference in a wide range of applications. In order to make it work, beamforming generally assumes that the speech source of interest and the interference source are inciden…
We propose computationally efficient carrier frequency offset estimators for multicarrier underwater acoustic communication using identical pilot tones equi-spaced in the frequency domain. The first estimator uses the phase of the maximal eigenvector of a channel-dependent correlation matrix. Next,…
Diffusion maps, when applied to large datasets, are typically constructed by a process of sampling and out-of-sample function extension. However, the performance of anomaly detection in large data when using diffusion maps is sensitive to the chosen samples. In this paper we propose an iterative dat…
In studies on artificial bandwidth extension (ABE), there is a lack of international coordination in subjective tests between multiple methods and languages. Here we present the design of absolute category rating listening tests evaluating 12 ABE variants of six approaches in multiple languages, nam…