An Online Solution for Localisation, Tracking and Separation of Moving Speech Sources

The problem of separating a time varying number of speech sources in a room is difficult to solve. The challenge lies in estimating the number and the location of these speech sources. Furthermore, the tracked speech sources need to be separated. This thesis proposes a solution which utilises the Random Finite Set approach to estimate the number and location of these speech sources and subsequently separate the speech source mixture via time frequency masking

Online Audio-Visual Multi-Source Tracking and Separation: A Labeled Random Finite Set Approach

The dissertation proposes an online solution for separating an unknown and time-varying number of moving sources using audio and visual data. The random finite set framework is used for the modeling and fusion of audio and visual data. This enables an online tracking algorithm to estimate the source positions and identities for each time point. With this information, a set of beamformers can be designed to separate each desired source and suppress the interfering sources

Acoustic Speaker Localization with Strong Reverberation and Adaptive Feature Filtering with a Bayes RFS Framework

The thesis investigates the challenges of speaker localization in presence of strong reverberation, multi-speaker tracking, and multi-feature multi-speaker state filtering, using sound recordings from microphones. Novel reverberation-robust speaker localization algorithms are derived from the signal and room acoustics models. A multi-speaker tracking filter and a multi-feature multi-speaker state filter are developed based upon the generalized labeled multi-Bernoulli random finite set framework. Experiments and comparative studies have verified and demonstrated the benefits of the proposed methods

Acoustic source localisation and tracking using microphone arrays

This thesis considers the domain of acoustic source localisation and tracking in an indoor environment. Acoustic tracking has applications in security, human-computer interaction, and the diarisation of meetings. Source localisation and tracking is typically a computationally expensive task, making it hard to process on-line, especially as the number of speakers to track increases. Much of the literature considers single-source localisation, however a practical system must be able to cope with multiple speakers, possibly active simultaneously, without knowing beforehand how many speakers are present. Techniques are explored for reducing the computational requirements of an acoustic localisation system. Techniques to localise and track multiple active sources are also explored, and developed to be more computationally efficient than the current state of the art algorithms, whilst being able to track more speakers. The first contribution is the modification of a recent single-speaker source localisation technique, which improves the localisation speed. This is achieved by formalising the implicit assumption by the modified algorithm that speaker height is uniformly distributed on the vertical axis. Estimating height information effectively reduces the search space where speakers have previously been detected, but who may have moved over the horizontal-plane, and are unlikely to have significantly changed height. This is developed to allow multiple non-simultaneously active sources to be located. This is applicable when the system is given information from a secondary source such as a set of cameras allowing the efficient identification of active speakers rather than just the locations of people in the environment. The next contribution of the thesis is the application of a particle swarm technique to significantly further decrease the computational cost of localising a single source in an indoor environment, compared the state of the art. Several variants of the particle swarm technique are explored, including novel variants designed specifically for localising acoustic sources. Each method is characterised in terms of its computational complexity as well as the average localisation error. The techniques’ responses to acoustic noise are also considered, and they are found to be robust. A further contribution is made by using multi-optima swarm techniques to localise multiple simultaneously active sources. This makes use of techniques which extend the single-source particle swarm techniques to finding multiple optima of the acoustic objective function. Several techniques are investigated and their performance in terms of localisation accuracy and computational complexity is characterised. Consideration is also given to how these metrics change when an increasing number of active speakers are to be localised. Finally, the application of the multi-optima localisation methods as an input to a multi-target tracking system is presented. Tracking multiple speakers is a more complex task than tracking single acoustic source, as observations of audio activity must be associated in some way with distinct speakers. The tracker used is known to be a relatively efficient technique, and the nature of the multi-optima output format is modified to allow the application of this technique to the task of speaker tracking

Application of sound source separation methods to advanced spatial audio systems

This thesis is related to the field of Sound Source Separation (SSS). It addresses the development and evaluation of these techniques for their application in the resynthesis of high-realism sound scenes by means of Wave Field Synthesis (WFS). Because the vast majority of audio recordings are preserved in twochannel stereo format, special up-converters are required to use advanced spatial audio reproduction formats, such as WFS. This is due to the fact that WFS needs the original source signals to be available, in order to accurately synthesize the acoustic field inside an extended listening area. Thus, an object-based mixing is required. Source separation problems in digital signal processing are those in which several signals have been mixed together and the objective is to find out what the original signals were. Therefore, SSS algorithms can be applied to existing two-channel mixtures to extract the different objects that compose the stereo scene. Unfortunately, most stereo mixtures are underdetermined, i.e., there are more sound sources than audio channels. This condition makes the SSS problem especially difficult and stronger assumptions have to be taken, often related to the sparsity of the sources under some signal transformation. This thesis is focused on the application of SSS techniques to the spatial sound reproduction field. As a result, its contributions can be categorized within these two areas. First, two underdetermined SSS methods are proposed to deal efficiently with the separation of stereo sound mixtures. These techniques are based on a multi-level thresholding segmentation approach, which enables to perform a fast and unsupervised separation of sound sources in the time-frequency domain. Although both techniques rely on the same clustering type, the features considered by each of them are related to different localization cues that enable to perform separation of either instantaneous or real mixtures.Additionally, two post-processing techniques aimed at improving the isolation of the separated sources are proposed. The performance achieved by several SSS methods in the resynthesis of WFS sound scenes is afterwards evaluated by means of listening tests, paying special attention to the change observed in the perceived spatial attributes. Although the estimated sources are distorted versions of the original ones, the masking effects involved in their spatial remixing make artifacts less perceptible, which improves the overall assessed quality. Finally, some novel developments related to the application of time-frequency processing to source localization and enhanced sound reproduction are presented.Cobos Serrano, M. (2009). Application of sound source separation methods to advanced spatial audio systems [Tesis doctoral no publicada]. Universitat Politècnica de València. https://doi.org/10.4995/Thesis/10251/8969Palanci

A Geometric Deep Learning Approach to Sound Source Localization and Tracking

La localización y el tracking de fuentes sonoras mediante agrupaciones de micrófonos es un problema que, pese a llevar décadas siendo estudiado, permanece abierto. En los últimos años, modelos basados en deep learning han superado el estado del arte que había sido establecido por las técnicas clásicas de procesado de señal, pero estos modelos todavía presentan problemas para trabajar en espacios con alta reverberación o para realizar el tracking de varias fuentes sonoras, especialmente cuando no es posible aplicar ningún criterio para clasificarlas u ordenarlas. En esta tesis, se proponen nuevos modelos que, basados en las ideas del Geometric Deep Learning, suponen un avance en el estado del arte para las situaciones mencionadas previamente.Los modelos propuestos utilizan como entrada mapas de potencia acústica calculados con el algoritmo SRP-PHAT, una técnica clásica de procesado de señal que permite estimar la energía acústica recibida desde cualquier dirección del espacio. Además, también proponemos una nueva técnica para suprimir analíticamente el efecto de una fuente en las funciones de correlación cruzada usadas para calcular los mapas SRP-PHAT. Basándonos en técnicas de banda estrecha, se demuestra que es posible proyectar las funciones de correlación cruzada de las señales capturadas por una agrupación de micrófonos a un espacio ortogonal a una dirección dada simplemente usando una combinación lineal de las funciones originales con retardos temporales. La técnica propuesta puede usarse para diseñar sistemas iterativos de localización de múltiples fuentes que, tras localizar la fuente con mayor energía en las funciones de correlación cruzada o en los mapas SRP-PHAT, la cancelen para poder encontrar otras fuentes que estuvieran enmascaradas por ella.Antes de poder entrenar modelos de deep learning necesitamos datos. Esto, en el caso de seguir un esquema de aprendizaje supervisado, supone un dataset de grabaciones de audio multicanal con la posición de las fuentes etiquetada con precisión. Pese a que existen algunos datasets con estas características, estos no son lo suficientemente extensos para entrenar una red neuronal y los entornos acústicos que incluyen no son suficientemente variados. Para solventar el problema de la falta de datos, presentamos una técnica para simular escenas acústicas con una o varias fuentes en movimiento y, para realizar estas simulaciones conforme son necesarias durante el entrenamiento de la red, presentamos la que es, que sepamos, la primera librería de software libre para la simulación de acústica de salas con aceleración por GPU. Tal y como queda demostrado en esta tesis, esta librería es más de dos órdenes de magnitud más rápida que otras librerías del estado del arte.La idea principal del Geometric Deep Learning es que los modelos deberían compartir las simetrías (i.e. las invarianzas y equivarianzas) de los datos y el problema que se quiere resolver. Para la estimación de la dirección de llegada de una única fuente, el uso de mapas SRP-PHAT como entrada de nuestros modelos hace que la equivarianza a las rotaciones sea obvia y, tras presentar una primera aproximación usando redes convolucionales tridimensionales, presentamos un modelo basado en convoluciones icosaédricas que son capaces de aproximar la equivarianza al grupo continuo de rotaciones esféricas por la equivarianza al grupo discreto de las 60 simetrías del icosaedro. En la tesis se demuestra que los mapas SRP-PHAT son una característica de entrada mucho más robusta que los espectrogramas que se usan típicamente en muchos modelos del estado del arte y que el uso de las convoluciones icosaédricas, combinado con una nueva función softargmax que obtiene una salida de regresión a partir del resultado de una red convolucional interpretándolo como una distribución de probabilidad y calculando su valor esperado, permite reducir enormemente el número de parámetros entrenables de los modelos sin reducir la precisión de sus estimaciones.Cuando queremos realizar el tracking de varias fuentes en movimiento y no podemos aplicar ningún criterio para ordenarlas o clasificarlas, el problema se vuelve invariante a las permutaciones de las estimaciones, por lo que no podemos compararlas directamente con las etiquetas de referencia dado que no podemos esperar que sigan el mismo orden. Este tipo de modelos se han entrenado típicamente usando estrategias de entrenamiento invariantes a las permutaciones, pero estas normalmente no penalizan los cambios de identidad por lo que los modelos entrenados con ellas no mantienen la identidad de cada fuente de forma consistente. Para resolver este problema, en esta tesis proponemos una nueva estrategia de entrenamiento, a la que llamamos sliding permutation invariant training (sPIT), que es capaz de optimizar todas las características que podemos esperar de un sistema de tracking de múltiples fuentes: la precisión de sus estimaciones de dirección de llegada, la exactitud de sus detecciones y la consistencia de las identidades asignadas a cada fuente.Finalmente, proponemos un nuevo tipo de red recursiva que usa conjuntos de vectores en lugar de vectores para representar su entrada y su estado y que es invariante a las permutaciones de los elementos del conjunto de entrada y equivariante a las del conjunto de estado. En esta tesis se muestra como este es el comportamiento que deberíamos esperar de un sistema de tracking que toma como entradas las estimaciones de un modelo de localización multifuente y se compara el rendimiento de estas redes recursivas invariantes a las permutaciones con redes recursivas GRU convencionales para aplicaciones de tracking de fuentes sonoras.The localization and tracking of sound sources using microphone arrays is a problem that, even if it has attracted attention from the signal processing research community for decades, remains open. In recent years, deep learning models have surpassed the state-of-the-art that had been established by classic signal processing techniques, but these models still struggle with handling rooms with strong reverberations or tracking multiple sources that dynamically appear and disappear, especially when we cannot apply any criteria to classify or order them. In this thesis, we follow the ideas of the Geometric Deep Learning framework to propose new models and techniques that mean an advance of the state-of-the-art in the aforementioned scenarios. As the input of our models, we use acoustic power maps computed using the SRP-PHAT algorithm, a classic signal processing technique that allows us to estimate the acoustic energy received from any direction of the space and, therefore, compute arbitrary-shaped power maps. In addition, we also propose a new technique to analytically cancel a source from the generalized cross-correlations used to compute the SRP-PHAT maps. Based on previous narrowband cancellation techniques, we prove that we can project the cross-correlation functions of the signals captured by a microphone array into a space orthogonal to a given direction by just computing a linear combination of time-shifted versions of the original cross-correlations. The proposed cancellation technique can be used to design iterative multi-source localization systems where, after having found the strongest source in the generalized cross-correlation functions or in the SRP-PHAT maps, we can cancel it and find new sources that were previously masked by thefirst source. Before being able to train deep learning models we need data, which, in the case of following a supervised learning approach, means a dataset of multichannel recordings with the position of the sources accurately labeled. Although there exist some datasets like this, they are not large enough to train a neural network and the acoustic environments they include are not diverse enough. To overcome this lack of real data, we present a technique to simulate acoustic scenes with one or several moving sound sources and, to be able to perform these simulations as they are needed during the training, we present what is, to the best of our knowledge, the first free and open source room acoustics simulation library with GPU acceleration. As we prove in this thesis, the presented library is more than two orders of magnitude faster than other state-of-the-art CPU libraries. The main idea of the Geometric Deep Learning philosophy is that the models should fit the symmetries (i.e. the invariances and equivariances) of the data and the problem we want to solve. For single-source direction of arrival estimation, the use of SRP-PHAT maps as inputs of our models makes the rotational equivariance of the problem undeniably clear and, after a first approach using 3D convolutional neural networks, we present a model using icosahedral convolutions that approximate the equivariance to the continuous group of spherical rotations by the discrete group of the 60 icosahedral symmetries. We prove that the SRP-PHAT maps are a much more robust input feature than the spectrograms typically used in many state-of-the-art models and that the use of the icosahedral convolutions, combined with a new soft-argmax function that obtains a regression output from the output of the convolutional neural network by interpreting it as a probability distribution and computing its expected value, allows us to dramatically reduce the number of trainable parameters of the models without losing accuracy in their estimations. When we want to track multiple moving sources and we cannot use any criteria to order or classify them, the problem becomes invariant to the permutations of the estimates, so we cannot directly compare them with the ground truth labels since we cannot expect them to be in the same order. This kind of models has typically been trained using permutation invariant training strategies, but these strategies usually do not penalize the identity switches and the models trained with them do not keep the identity of every source consistent during the tracking. To solve this issue, we propose a new training strategy, which we call sliding permutation invariant training, that is able to optimize all the features that we could expect from a multi-source tracking system: the precision of the direction of arrival estimates, the accuracy of the source detections, and the consistency of the assigned identities. Finally, we propose a new kind of recursive neural network that, instead of using vectors as their input and their state, uses sets of vectors and is invariant to the permutation of the elements of the input set and equivariant to the permutations of the elements of the state set. We show how this is the behavior that we should expect from a tracking model which takes as inputs the estimates of a multi-source localization model and compare these permutation-invariant recursive neural networks with the conventional gated recurrent units for sound source tracking applications.<br /

De-interleaving of Radar Pulses for EW Receivers with an ELINT Application

De-interleaving is a critical function in Electronic Warfare (EW) that has not received much attention in the literature regarding on-line Electronic Intelligence (ELINT) application. In ELINT, on-line analysis is important in order to allow for efficient data collection and for support of operational decisions. This dissertation proposed a de-interleaving solution for use with ELINT/Electronic-Support-Measures (ESM) receivers for purposes of ELINT with on-line application. The proposed solution does not require complex integration with existing EW systems or modifications to their sub-systems. Before proposing the solution, on-line de-interleaving algorithms were surveyed. Density-based spatial clustering of applications with noise (DBSCAN) is a clustering algorithm that has not been used before in de-interleaving; in this dissertation, it has proved to be effective. DBSCAN was thus selected as a component of the proposed de-interleaving solution due to its advantages over other surveyed algorithms. The proposed solution relies primarily on the parameters of Angle of Arrival (AOA), Radio Frequency (RF), and Time of Arrival (TOA). The time parameter was utilized in resolving RF agility. The solution is a system that is composed of different building blocks. The solution handles complex radar environments that include agility in RF, Pulse Width (PW), and Pulse Repetition Interval (PRI)

Single- and multi-microphone speech dereverberation using spectral enhancement

In speech communication systems, such as voice-controlled systems, hands-free mobile telephones, and hearing aids, the received microphone signals are degraded by room reverberation, background noise, and other interferences. This signal degradation may lead to total unintelligibility of the speech and decreases the performance of automatic speech recognition systems. In the context of this work reverberation is the process of multi-path propagation of an acoustic sound from its source to one or more microphones. The received microphone signal generally consists of a direct sound, reflections that arrive shortly after the direct sound (commonly called early reverberation), and reflections that arrive after the early reverberation (commonly called late reverberation). Reverberant speech can be described as sounding distant with noticeable echo and colouration. These detrimental perceptual effects are primarily caused by late reverberation, and generally increase with increasing distance between the source and microphone. Conversely, early reverberations tend to improve the intelligibility of speech. In combination with the direct sound it is sometimes referred to as the early speech component. Reduction of the detrimental effects of reflections is evidently of considerable practical importance, and is the focus of this dissertation. More specifically the dissertation deals with dereverberation techniques, i.e., signal processing techniques to reduce the detrimental effects of reflections. In the dissertation, novel single- and multimicrophone speech dereverberation algorithms are developed that aim at the suppression of late reverberation, i.e., at estimation of the early speech component. This is done via so-called spectral enhancement techniques that require a specific measure of the late reverberant signal. This measure, called spectral variance, can be estimated directly from the received (possibly noisy) reverberant signal(s) using a statistical reverberation model and a limited amount of a priori knowledge about the acoustic channel(s) between the source and the microphone(s). In our work an existing single-channel statistical reverberation model serves as a starting point. The model is characterized by one parameter that depends on the acoustic characteristics of the environment. We show that the spectral variance estimator that is based on this model, can only be used when the source-microphone distance is larger than the so-called critical distance. This is, crudely speaking, the distance where the direct sound power is equal to the total reflective power. A generalization of the statistical reverberation model in which the direct sound is incorporated is developed. This model requires one additional parameter that is related to the ratio between the direct sound energy and the sound energy of all reflections. The generalized model is used to derive a novel spectral variance estimator. When the novel estimator is used for dereverberation rather than the existing estimator, and the source-microphone distance is smaller than the critical distance, the dereverberation performance is significantly increased. Single-microphone systems only exploit the temporal and spectral diversity of the received signal. Reverberation, of course, also induces spatial diversity. To additionally exploit this diversity, multiple microphones must be used, and their outputs must be combined by a suitable spatial processor such as the so-called delay and sum beamformer. It is not a priori evident whether spectral enhancement is best done before or after the spatial processor. For this reason we investigate both possibilities, as well as a merge of the spatial processor and the spectral enhancement technique. An advantage of the latter option is that the spectral variance estimator can be further improved. Our experiments show that the use of multiple microphones affords a significant improvement of the perceptual speech quality. The applicability of the theory developed in this dissertation is demonstrated using a hands-free communication system. Since hands-free systems are often used in a noisy and reverberant environment, the received microphone signal does not only contain the desired signal but also interferences such as room reverberation that is caused by the desired source, background noise, and a far-end echo signal that results from a sound that is produced by the loudspeaker. Usually an acoustic echo canceller is used to cancel the far-end echo. Additionally a post-processor is used to suppress background noise and residual echo, i.e., echo which could not be cancelled by the echo canceller. In this work a novel structure and post-processor for an acoustic echo canceller are developed. The post-processor suppresses late reverberation caused by the desired source, residual echo, and background noise. The late reverberation and late residual echo are estimated using the generalized statistical reverberation model. Experimental results convincingly demonstrate the benefits of the proposed system for suppressing late reverberation, residual echo and background noise. The proposed structure and post-processor have a low computational complexity, a highly modular structure, can be seamlessly integrated into existing hands-free communication systems, and affords a significant increase of the listening comfort and speech intelligibility

Sustainable Agriculture and Advances of Remote Sensing (Volume 1)

Agriculture, as the main source of alimentation and the most important economic activity globally, is being affected by the impacts of climate change. To maintain and increase our global food system production, to reduce biodiversity loss and preserve our natural ecosystem, new practices and technologies are required. This book focuses on the latest advances in remote sensing technology and agricultural engineering leading to the sustainable agriculture practices. Earth observation data, in situ and proxy-remote sensing data are the main source of information for monitoring and analyzing agriculture activities. Particular attention is given to earth observation satellites and the Internet of Things for data collection, to multispectral and hyperspectral data analysis using machine learning and deep learning, to WebGIS and the Internet of Things for sharing and publishing the results, among others