Department Publications

With growing applications of drones, there is a demand for drone audition functionality that allows microphone arrays to be embedded into or attached to the body of drones for sound source localization and signal enhancement. In practical acoustical environments, the performance of drone audition is degraded due to the free-field sound propagation assumption. In this paper, we propose (i) a method for modeling the scattering and diffraction of a drone body beyond free-field propagation as a Drone-Related Transfer Function (DRTF), and (ii) a practical method to estimate the DRTF coefficients using circular loudspeaker arrays. The method incorporates the acoustic reciprocity principle and a finite order spherical harmonic expansion by utilizing a discrete set of measurements by multiple loudspeaker placements on circular arrays. We validate our DRTF model and parameterization method on a known rigid sphere …

The Relative Transfer Matrix (ReTM), recently introduced as a generalization of the relative transfer function for multiple receivers and sources, shows promising performance when applied to speech enhancement and speaker separation in noisy environments. Blindly estimating the ReTM of sound sources by exploiting the covariance matrices of multichannel recordings is highly beneficial for practical applications. In this paper, we use covariance subtraction to present a flexible and practically viable method for estimating the ReTM for a select set of independent sound sources. To show the versatility of the method, we validated it through a speaker separation application under reverberant conditions. Separation performance is evaluated at low signal-to-noise ratio levels in comparison with existing ReTM-based and relative transfer function-based estimators, in both simulated and real-life environments.

This review outlines the current status and proposes future directions for using auditory brainstem responses (ABRs) to continuous speech as a tool in hearing aid assessment. In current clinical practice, ABRs measured via electroencephalography (EEG) in response to short stimuli, averaged across repetitions, are a cornerstone of objective hearing screening and evaluation. Recent advancements have demonstrated that ABRs can be estimated from EEG recorded during continuous speech listening by using linear models which map the auditory speech features, extracted using auditory models, to continuous EEG activity. This approach enables the simultaneous investigation of multiple auditory pathway stages using complex, ecologically valid sounds; advancing potential future hearing assessments that can be seamlessly integrated into daily life. Current findings indicate that responses similar to click-ABRs …