On directivity of a circular arraywith directional microphones

© 2016 IEEE. Circular microphone arrays have a broad range of applications in teleconferencing and hands-free telecommunication systems. Directional microphones are extensively used to construct the circular arrays to obtain superior sound quality. However, the 360-degree coverage ability of this type of circular arrays is seldom investigated. In this paper, we develop a circular array with the use of four firstorder supercardioid microphones to obtain 360-degree coverage of sound recording in teleconferencing environments. Through analyzing the directional response of this array, we derive an optimal range of the array radius for uniform 360-degree coverage of sound capturing. Experiments are carried out in an anechoic chamber to test the performance of the developed microphone array

INSPIRE: Evaluation of a Smart-Home System for Infotainment Management and Device Control

This paper gives an overview of the assessment and evaluation methods which have been used to determine the quality of the INSPIRE smart home system. The system allows different home appliances to be controlled via speech, and consists of speech and speaker recognition, speech understanding, dialogue management, and speech output components. The performance of these components is first assessed individually, and then the entire system is evaluated in an interaction experiment with test users. Initial results of the assessment and evaluation are given, in particular with respect to the transmission channel impact on speech and speaker recognition, and the assessment of speech output for different system metaphors.Comment: 4 page

Improving speech intelligibility in hearing aids. Part I: Signal processing algorithms

[EN] The improvement of speech intelligibility in hearing aids is a traditional problem that still remains open and unsolved. Modern devices may include signal processing algorithms to improve intelligibility: automatic gain control, automatic environmental classification or speech enhancement. However, the design of such algorithms is strongly restricted by some engineering constraints caused by the reduced dimensions of hearing aid devices. In this paper, we discuss the application of state-of-theart signal processing algorithms to improve speech intelligibility in digital hearing aids, with particular emphasis on speech enhancement algorithms. Different alternatives for both monaural and binaural speech enhancement have been considered, arguing whether they are suitable to be implemented in a commercial hearing aid or not.This work has been funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation, under project TEC2012-38142-C04-02.Ayllón, D.; Gil Pita, R.; Rosa Zurera, M.; Padilla, L.; Piñero Sipán, MG.; Diego Antón, MD.; Ferrer Contreras, M.... (2014). Improving speech intelligibility in hearing aids. Part I: Signal processing algorithms. Waves. 6:61-71. http://hdl.handle.net/10251/57901S6171

Blind identification of acoustic systems and enhancement of reverberant speech

Imperial Users onl

RGB-D datasets using microsoft kinect or similar sensors: a survey

RGB-D data has turned out to be a very useful representation of an indoor scene for solving fundamental computer vision problems. It takes the advantages of the color image that provides appearance information of an object and also the depth image that is immune to the variations in color, illumination, rotation angle and scale. With the invention of the low-cost Microsoft Kinect sensor, which was initially used for gaming and later became a popular device for computer vision, high quality RGB-D data can be acquired easily. In recent years, more and more RGB-D image/video datasets dedicated to various applications have become available, which are of great importance to benchmark the state-of-the-art. In this paper, we systematically survey popular RGB-D datasets for different applications including object recognition, scene classification, hand gesture recognition, 3D-simultaneous localization and mapping, and pose estimation. We provide the insights into the characteristics of each important dataset, and compare the popularity and the difficulty of those datasets. Overall, the main goal of this survey is to give a comprehensive description about the available RGB-D datasets and thus to guide researchers in the selection of suitable datasets for evaluating their algorithms