Spatial, Spectral, and Perceptual Nonlinear Noise Reduction for Hands-free Microphones in a Car

Speech enhancement in an automobile is a challenging problem because interference can come from engine noise, fans, music, wind, road noise, reverberation, echo, and passengers engaging in other conversations. Hands-free microphones make the situation worse because the strength of the desired speech signal reduces with increased distance between the microphone and talker. Automobile safety is improved when the driver can use a hands-free interface to phones and other devices instead of taking his eyes off the road. The demand for high quality hands-free communication in the automobile requires the introduction of more powerful algorithms. This thesis shows that a unique combination of five algorithms can achieve superior speech enhancement for a hands-free system when compared to beamforming or spectral subtraction alone. Several different designs were analyzed and tested before converging on the configuration that achieved the best results. Beamforming, voice activity detection, spectral subtraction, perceptual nonlinear weighting, and talker isolation via pitch tracking all work together in a complementary iterative manner to create a speech enhancement system capable of significantly enhancing real world speech signals. The following conclusions are supported by the simulation results using data recorded in a car and are in strong agreement with theory. Adaptive beamforming, like the Generalized Side-lobe Canceller (GSC), can be effectively used if the filters only adapt during silent data frames because too much of the desired speech is cancelled otherwise. Spectral subtraction removes stationary noise while perceptual weighting prevents the introduction of offensive audible noise artifacts. Talker isolation via pitch tracking can perform better when used after beamforming and spectral subtraction because of the higher accuracy obtained after initial noise removal. Iterating the algorithm once increases the accuracy of the Voice Activity Detection (VAD), which improves the overall performance of the algorithm. Placing the microphone(s) on the ceiling above the head and slightly forward of the desired talker appears to be the best location in an automobile based on the experiments performed in this thesis. Objective speech quality measures show that the algorithm removes a majority of the stationary noise in a hands-free environment of an automobile with relatively minimal speech distortion

Simulation of Multi-element Antenna Systems for Navigation Applications

The application of user terminals with multiple antenna inputs for use with the global satellite navigation systems like GPS and Galileo becomes more and more attraction in last years. Multiple antennas may be spread over the user platform and provide signals required for the platform attitude estimation or may be arranged in an antenna array to be used together with array processing algorithms for improving signal reception, e.g. for multipath and interference mitigation. In order to generate signals for testing of receivers with multiple antenna inputs and corresponding receiver algorithms in a laboratory environment a unique HW signal simulation tool for wavefront simulation has been developed. The signals for a number of antenna elements in a flexible user defined geometry are first generated as digital signals in baseband and then mixed up to individual RF-outputs. The paper describes the principle function of the system and addresses some calibration issues. Measurement set-ups and results of data processing with simulated signals for different applications are shown and discussed

Energy efficient 5G networks

For a greener tomorrow, an important step today will be the energy efficient designs in any aspect. The 5G networks which is most awaited by all, though proposes better data rates, but also speaks about the energy efficiency in its agenda. A broad study of different techniques for energy efficiency reveals that beamforming plays a crucial role. Thus leading to this thesis mainly concentrating on the aspects of beamforming. Beamforming though has been into existence for more than over a decade, continuous improvements in the methodology keeps it ahead of many other technologies used for the common goal. This thesis work is done with the concept called multi-beam beamforming. An interesting concept of amplitude tapering is tailed to keep a check on the magnitude of power supplied at the antenna terminals. Using these, the thesis compares the gain values of both the desired and undesired users which will aid in estimating the amount of power required for covering a set of users using different tapering methods. This works also includes the effect of increasing number of antennas and the users and the effect on the gain values for both desired and undesired users. This develops a scope to introduce a new metric called “potential power improvement” for different tapering methods. Also, a framework has been developed to expand and evaluate the cases mentioned above to a multi-cell scenario in both general antenna configuration and Massive MIMO configuration

On the eigenfilter design method and its applications: a tutorial

The eigenfilter method for digital filter design involves the computation of filter coefficients as the eigenvector of an appropriate Hermitian matrix. Because of its low complexity as compared to other methods as well as its ability to incorporate various time and frequency-domain constraints easily, the eigenfilter method has been found to be very useful. In this paper, we present a review of the eigenfilter design method for a wide variety of filters, including linear-phase finite impulse response (FIR) filters, nonlinear-phase FIR filters, all-pass infinite impulse response (IIR) filters, arbitrary response IIR filters, and multidimensional filters. Also, we focus on applications of the eigenfilter method in multistage filter design, spectral/spacial beamforming, and in the design of channel-shortening equalizers for communications applications

Algorithms for FFT Beamforming Radio Interferometers

Radio interferometers consisting of identical antennas arranged on a regular lattice permit fast Fourier transform beamforming, which reduces the correlation cost from $\mathcal{O}(n^2)$ in the number of antennas to $\mathcal{O}(n\log n)$. We develop a formalism for describing this process and apply this formalism to derive a number of algorithms with a range of observational applications. These include algorithms for forming arbitrarily pointed tied-array beams from the regularly spaced Fourier-transform formed beams, sculpting the beams to suppress sidelobes while only losing percent-level sensitivity, and optimally estimating the position of a detected source from its observed brightness in the set of beams. We also discuss the effect that correlations in the visibility-space noise, due to cross-talk and sky contributions, have on the optimality of Fourier transform beamforming, showing that it does not strictly preserve the sky information of the $n^2$ correlation, even for an idealized array. Our results have applications to a number of upcoming interferometers, in particular the Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment--Fast Radio Burst (CHIME/FRB) project.Comment: 17 pages, 4 figures, accepted to Ap

A Noise-Robust Method with Smoothed \ell_1/\ell_2 Regularization for Sparse Moving-Source Mapping

The method described here performs blind deconvolution of the beamforming output in the frequency domain. To provide accurate blind deconvolution, sparsity priors are introduced with a smooth \ell_1/\ell_2 regularization term. As the mean of the noise in the power spectrum domain is dependent on its variance in the time domain, the proposed method includes a variance estimation step, which allows more robust blind deconvolution. Validation of the method on both simulated and real data, and of its performance, are compared with two well-known methods from the literature: the deconvolution approach for the mapping of acoustic sources, and sound density modeling