Projects

The healthy human auditory system is able to attend to a particular speaker of interest in a multi-speaker scenario. Current hearing aids, however, cannot sufficiently mimic this ability, possibly leading to far-reaching consequences for hearing impaired people, such as social isolation. For effective noise suppression and correct speaker amplification, it is crucial to detect which speaker of multiple speakers should be attended to. By ...

Hearing aid users have difficulties to understand speech in noisy environments, which is why hearing aids are equipped with noise reduction algorithms. However, these algorithms often fail in so-called ‘cocktail-party’ scenarios with multiple speakers, because they do not know which speaker the user aims to attend to, and which speaker(s) should be treated as noise. Recent research has shown that it is possible to identify the attended ...

Partly due to the rapid pace of aging of the world population, it is expected that by 2050 more than 900 million people will experience hearing loss. Since adequate hearing is a prerequisite for daily life communication, hearing impairment increases the risk of social isolation and poorer physical functioning, which in turn negatively affects quality of life. Currently, hearing aids are the most used and well-known treatment for hearing ...

People with hearing impairment often have difficulties to understand speech in noisy environments. This can be partly overcome by the use of noise reduction algorithms in auditory prostheses such as hearing aids or cochlear implants. However, in a multi-speaker scenario, such algorithms do not know which speaker is to be enhanced, and which speaker(s) should be treated as noise. When listening to multiple speakers, neural (cortical) activity ...

Signal processing algorithms in hearing aids and cochlear implants allow to suppress background noise for improved speech intelligibility for the hearing impaired. By using multiple microphones, beamforming techniques can be applied to filter out sound from a target direction, and to suppress the noise from other directions. Traditional binaural beamforming algorithms for hearing devices often assume that the target talker is known or can be ...

Recent technological advances in analogue and digital electronics as well as in hardware miniaturization have taken wireless sensing devices to another level by introducing low-power communication protocols, improved digital signal processing capabilities and compact sensors. When these devices perform a certain pre-defined signal processing (SP) task such as the estimation or detection of phenomena of interest, a cooperative scheme through ...

The objective of this PhD project is to challenge the widely accepted premise that single-microphone audio analysis cannot rely on spatial or wavenumber domain signal representations. This premise implies that the spatial diversity of acoustic environments (e.g. spatial spreading of sound sources) cannot be exploited in single-microphone devices, hence limiting their applicability in a wide variety of speech and audio applications, including ...