Blind Signal Separation from Unidentifiable Systems. This project will contribute to the designated national research priority goal on frontier Information and Communications Technology. The outcomes of the project will advance the theory of signal processing and enable performance improvement of a wide range of hi-tech applications. This project will enhance Australia's research reputation and competitiveness, promote the understanding and applications of advanced signal processing techniques i ....Blind Signal Separation from Unidentifiable Systems. This project will contribute to the designated national research priority goal on frontier Information and Communications Technology. The outcomes of the project will advance the theory of signal processing and enable performance improvement of a wide range of hi-tech applications. This project will enhance Australia's research reputation and competitiveness, promote the understanding and applications of advanced signal processing techniques in local industries, and provide excellent training opportunity for PhD and Honours students.Read moreRead less
Optimum Multi-rate Filter Bank Design for Speech Enhancement and Communication Systems. Multi-rate signal processing is gaining more and more importance in signal processing applications such as echo cancellation, microphone arrays, speech enhancement and equalisation. This project is aimed at obtaining high performance and high efficiency multi-rate processing designs by developing appropriate problem formulations based on solid mathematical foundations so that powerful optimisation techniques ....Optimum Multi-rate Filter Bank Design for Speech Enhancement and Communication Systems. Multi-rate signal processing is gaining more and more importance in signal processing applications such as echo cancellation, microphone arrays, speech enhancement and equalisation. This project is aimed at obtaining high performance and high efficiency multi-rate processing designs by developing appropriate problem formulations based on solid mathematical foundations so that powerful optimisation techniques can be applied. The developed multi-rate systems will result in low complexity and low power hardware implementations without significant compromise in performance in each application. Size and cost sensitive of communication devices such as personal data assistants, mobile telephones, hands-free devices, and laptops will benefit greatly from the outcome of the project.Read moreRead less
Human-Unmanned Aerial Vehicle interactions: Making drones talk and listen. This project aims to develop audio technology to enable unmanned aerial vehicles or drones to hear, use speech and sound to communicate with humans, acoustically sense their surroundings and make them less noisy. This project expects to generate new knowledge in acoustic signal processing and its application in drones using innovative approaches, such as use of miniature microphone and loudspeaker arrays, and active noise ....Human-Unmanned Aerial Vehicle interactions: Making drones talk and listen. This project aims to develop audio technology to enable unmanned aerial vehicles or drones to hear, use speech and sound to communicate with humans, acoustically sense their surroundings and make them less noisy. This project expects to generate new knowledge in acoustic signal processing and its application in drones using innovative approaches, such as use of miniature microphone and loudspeaker arrays, and active noise control. Expected outcomes include development of new theories, Intellectual Property, with potential commercial value, and training of next generation researchers. This should provide significant benefits with applications in life saving, search and rescue operations, transportation of goods, and creation of 3D media.Read moreRead less
Mobile Device Autoconfiguration. Todays cellular networks are built to optimise spectrum efficiency by combining specific codecs and matching bearer services. With general purpose mobile terminals that can access different network types the applications will break this optimisation by using generic codecs. This project aims at solving this problem by letting the access networks configure the terminals with the natively supported codecs and bearer service definitions. The project will lead to con ....Mobile Device Autoconfiguration. Todays cellular networks are built to optimise spectrum efficiency by combining specific codecs and matching bearer services. With general purpose mobile terminals that can access different network types the applications will break this optimisation by using generic codecs. This project aims at solving this problem by letting the access networks configure the terminals with the natively supported codecs and bearer service definitions. The project will lead to considerably higher cost effectiveness in the emerging mobile Internet.Read moreRead less
Bio-inspired speech analysis: Specialised information processing of vocalisations in the auditory brainstem. This project has the potential to benefit bionic ear and hearing aid users through the development of signal processing methods that mimic the amazing abilities of the brain. Speech perception performance by bionic ear users has reached a plateau and these new strategies could produce the breakthrough needed to provide the next increase in performance. The benefit for greater improved hea ....Bio-inspired speech analysis: Specialised information processing of vocalisations in the auditory brainstem. This project has the potential to benefit bionic ear and hearing aid users through the development of signal processing methods that mimic the amazing abilities of the brain. Speech perception performance by bionic ear users has reached a plateau and these new strategies could produce the breakthrough needed to provide the next increase in performance. The benefit for greater improved hearing has enormous benefit and potential for improving the quality of life of the hearing impaired, especially those with severe and profound hearing loss. In addition, the algorithms may provide more robust automatic speech recognition, making this technology more useful in everyday situations; the markets that this would open up are enormous.Read moreRead less
Iterative subspace expansions for space-time adaptive wireless communications, radar and sonar. This project addresses the fundamental challenge of high receiver complexity for bandwidth-efficient, high data-rate wireless communications, radar and sonar. We do this by designing the signal transmissions so that smart receivers can detect the signals in "warp speed". We expect these results to have an immediate impact on the design of next generation communications technologies. Information and Co ....Iterative subspace expansions for space-time adaptive wireless communications, radar and sonar. This project addresses the fundamental challenge of high receiver complexity for bandwidth-efficient, high data-rate wireless communications, radar and sonar. We do this by designing the signal transmissions so that smart receivers can detect the signals in "warp speed". We expect these results to have an immediate impact on the design of next generation communications technologies. Information and Communications Technology (ICT) has been recognised by the Australian Government as a National Research Priority. This research project will contribute to the intellectual property in ICT held by Australia, and help supply Australian industries with the knowledge necessary to participate in the development of frontier technologies.Read moreRead less
Blind separation of mutually correlated sources. This project is aimed at developing novel techniques for blind separation of mutually correlated sources. The expected outcomes will significantly advance the theory of blind source separation and improve the performance of important practical systems, such as densely deployed sensor networks and wireless video surveillance systems.
Frequency-related features derived from phase spectrum for robust speech recognition. Though the currently available speech recognizers work reasonably well in noise-free environments, their performance deteriorates drastically even in the presence of a small amount of noise. In order to overcome this problem, new frequency-related features are proposed in this project for speech recognition. These features are derived from the phase spectrum of the speech signal, and are expected to be robust t ....Frequency-related features derived from phase spectrum for robust speech recognition. Though the currently available speech recognizers work reasonably well in noise-free environments, their performance deteriorates drastically even in the presence of a small amount of noise. In order to overcome this problem, new frequency-related features are proposed in this project for speech recognition. These features are derived from the phase spectrum of the speech signal, and are expected to be robust to the additive noise distortion. These features will make the speech recognizer less sensitive to noise and will enhance its utility in a number of applications in the telecommunication and business world.Read moreRead less
Fixed and variable-length segment vocoders for very low bitrate speech coding. Reliable and secure voice communication is an important aspect of military and defence operations. In order to reduce the possibility of interception, low power transmitters are normally used for radio communications, where the bandwidth is often very low. Military voice communication, therefore, requires the coding of speech at very low bitrates. Our research proposal aims to develop speech coders that can operate ....Fixed and variable-length segment vocoders for very low bitrate speech coding. Reliable and secure voice communication is an important aspect of military and defence operations. In order to reduce the possibility of interception, low power transmitters are normally used for radio communications, where the bandwidth is often very low. Military voice communication, therefore, requires the coding of speech at very low bitrates. Our research proposal aims to develop speech coders that can operate at lower bitrates and reproduce speech of high quality and intelligibility. This is highly beneficial to the defence forces of Australia as it will permit the use of high-grade encryption technology to improve the security of transmission.Read moreRead less
Beamforming with acoustic vector sensors for audio user interfaces. We aim to create new Audio User Interfaces (AUIs) for the automatic separation and annotation of audio from complex sound scenes using acoustic vector sensor beamforming technology. Specifically, we will develop: speech AUIs for noisy, multi-talker, reverberant environments; and sound transcription AUIs for the deaf. Ultimately, users will be able to walk into a room, hold conversations and leave with a searchable, automatically ....Beamforming with acoustic vector sensors for audio user interfaces. We aim to create new Audio User Interfaces (AUIs) for the automatic separation and annotation of audio from complex sound scenes using acoustic vector sensor beamforming technology. Specifically, we will develop: speech AUIs for noisy, multi-talker, reverberant environments; and sound transcription AUIs for the deaf. Ultimately, users will be able to walk into a room, hold conversations and leave with a searchable, automatically-generated transcript of the audio events, tagged with metadata. The application of these technologies will create new possibilities for recording audio in the music, radio, TV industries, and future home based audio communication systems.Read moreRead less