Research Topics

  •  In contrast to satellite-based outdoor positioning systems that have been around for several decades, indoor applications have not seen generic, robust solutions yet. The reason lies in  fundamental technical and physical challenges. At a first glance, radio frequency (RF) signals seem to be a very promising measurement technology to provide the geometry-related raw data for the positioning system. They can penetrate materials, propagate over large distances, and transceivers can be implemented at low cost, small size, and with low power consumption.

  • Distant automatic speech recognition for use in human-machine interaction as well as automatic event detection and localization used in e-Health surveillance and assistance applications require an automatic localization and separation of the acoustic source. At our lab, research in Acoustic Source Localization and Separation covers localization of a single and of multiple concurrent acoustic sources using single-channel or multi-channel audio inputs.

  • A well-understood special case of nonlinear signal processing is found in adaptive signal processing and control. In its classical setting, a parameterized linear system is used to represent a weakly nonlinear system around an operating point where the optimal parameterization is learnt from the observation of the system input and a desired system output using on-line parameter adaptation algorithms.

  •  The physical basis for wireless communications is the radio channel whos properties are determined by the effects of multipath propagation. A basic description of the channel is easily found. The received signal is a sum of delayed and attenuated copies of the transmitted signal, due to reflections at any kind of objects in the propagation environment. But the technical implication of these meachanisms is tremendous.

  •  All signal processing systems need to be realized with analog circuits, digital hardware and/or software, or mixed-signal systems which constitute the combination af analog and digital subsystems. Such designs acknowledge that interaction with the physical environment is always analog while digital implementation becomes more and more advantageous in terms of hardware resources and powerconsumption.

  • Information Theory is traditionally concerned with data transmission and compression and has not recieved as much intention for the description of signel processing systems. While traditional signal processing measures are related to signal energy and correlation, an information processing view should emphasize the amount of entropy generated by a signal model or the amount of entropy reduction resulting from an input-output system operation.


    Audio demonstration of results obtained for the accepted paper to INTERSPEECH2013

    Mario Kaoru Watanabe and Pejman Mowlaee

  • Research in Language Technologies at our lab is mainly motivated by challenges in automatic speech recognition back-end processing such as language modelling, modelling variation in pronunciation, or text alignment. Our text analysis methods comprise customizable phonetic and semantic similarity measures which have been evaluated on large industrial and scientific text collections with respect to large vocabulary continuous speech recognition (dictation). 

  • Nonlinear Modeling aims at a more accurate representation of physical reality where many systems are found to violate the basic prerequisite of linear models: the so-called superposition principle which states that the effect of the sum of multiple system inputs equals the sum of the effects of the individual inputs. This principle is often violated due to limitations in the maximum amplitude a physical quantity may reach, and due to basic physical laws which show a nonlinear relationship among the relevant variables of the problem domain.

  • Probabilistic graphical models unite probability and graph theory and allow to efficiently formalize both static and dynamic, as well as linear and nonlinear systems and processes. Many well-known statistical models, e.g. mixture models, factor analysis, hidden Markov models, Kalman filters, Bayesian networks, Boltzmann machines, the Ising model, just to name a few, can be represented in the framework of graphical models. This framework provides techniques for inference (sum/max-product algorithm) and learning.

  • The automatic and simultaneous identification, localization, and tracking of targets using electromagnetic radiation started mainly as a military application in radar systems. In the early 1970s, commercial tracking of large and expensive goods emerged, followed by smaller items by the end of the 20th century. Since then, RF identification (RFID) became almost ubiquitous in commercial applications, e.g., tracking and identification of goods or electronic article surveillance.

  •  Our group is concerned with the development of algorithms for a range of important speech analysis tasks both for single channel and multichannel speech. These tasks include voice activity detection, speech enhancement, pitch and multipitch tracking, phone segmentation and classification as well as speaker segmentation and identification.

  • At our lab, automatic speech recognition research is focused around front-end processing for robust speech recognition (noise reduction, voice  activity detection, blind source separation, and speech quality assessment). Our algorithms have been tested in various ASR contexts, from  command&control applications on embedded devices in industrial environments (SNOW) and air traffic control (ATCOSIM), to large vocabulary dictation systems  (COAST-ROBUST).

  • Speech is only useful when it is transmitted from a speaker to a listener. Very often this is done in a telecommunication setting. If we want to transmit speech often there are restrictions that include limited audio and/or network bandwidth. Therefore, one issue is to use the available resources - while maximizing the speech quality - by finding efficient speech coding and error concealment strategies. In a real-world-environment the speech signal cannot be picked up with perfect quality, e.g. when the speaker is driving a car.

  • The wealth of advantages derived from a large signaling bandwidth has motivated the considerable interest shown in the past years towards Ultra Wideband (UWB) communication systems. The possibility of extremely high data rates as well as high-accuracy ranging, together with the promise of low-power and low-complexity devices are some of the many features making UWB so attractive. However, UWB system design poses a number of new technical challenges, and traditional design guidelines are insufficient, or even misleading.
