11 accepted papers
Reverberation negatively impacts the performance of automatic speech recognition (ASR). Prior work on quantifying the effect of reverberation has shown that clarity (C50), a parameter that can be estimated from the acoustic impulse response, is correlated with ASR performance. In this paper we propo…
We study the detailed temporal evolution of echo density in impulse responses for applications in acoustic analysis and rendering on general environments. For this purpose, we propose a smooth sorted density measure that yields an intuitive trend of echo density growth with time. This is fitted with…
Recent work on acoustic parameter estimation indicates that geometric room volume can be useful for modeling the character of an acoustic environment. However, estimating volume from audio signals remains a challenging problem. Here we propose using a convolutional neural network model to estimate t…
A powerful and flexible approach to record or encode a spatial sound scene is through spherical harmonics (SHs), or Ambisonics. An SH-encoded scene can be rendered binaurally by applying SH-encoded head-related transfer functions (HRTFs). Limitations of the recording equipment or computational const…
The advent of mixed reality consumer products brings about a pressing need to develop and improve spatial sound rendering techniques for a broad user base. Despite a large body of prior work, the precise nature and importance of various sound localization cues and how they should be personalized for…
When using a set of generic head-related transfer functions (HRTFs) for spatial sound rendering, personalisation can be considered to minimise localisation errors. This typically involves tuning the characteristics of the HRTFs or a parametric model according to the listener's anthropometry. However…
Head-related transfer functions (HRTFs) depend on the shape of the human head and ears, motivating HRTF personalization methods that detect and exploit morphological similarities between subjects in an HRTF database and a new user. Prior work determined similarity from sets of morphological paramete…
Microphone arrays are beneficial for distant speech capture because the signals they capture can be exploited with beamforming to suppress noise and reverberation. The theory for the design and analysis of microphone arrays is well established, however the performance of a microphone array beamforme…
Reverberation time is an important parameter for characterizing acoustic environments. It is useful in many applications including acoustic scene analysis, robust automatic speech recognition and dereverberation. Given knowledge of the acoustic impulse response, reverberation time can be measured us…
Beamforming and channel equalizers can be formulated as optimal multichannel filter-and-sum operations with different objective criteria. It has been shown in previous studies that the combination of both concepts under a common framework can yield results that combine both the spatial robustness of…
The estimation of acoustic propagation delays from a sound source to a listener's ear entrances is useful for understanding and visualising the wave propagation along the surface of the head, and necessary for individualised spatial sound rendering. The interaural time difference (ITD) is of particu…