Steered Response Power for Sound Source Localization: a tutorial review.

In the last three decades, the Steered Response Power (SRP) method has been widely used for the task of Sound Source Localization (SSL), due to its satisfactory localization performance on moderately reverberant and noisy scenarios. Many works have analysed and extended the original SRP method to reduce its computational cost, to allow it to locate multiple sources, or to improve its performance in adverse environments. In this work, we review over 200 papers on the SRP method and its variants, with emphasis on the SRP-PHAT method.

Practical utility of a head-mounted gaze-directed beamforming system.

Assistive auditory devices that enhance signal-to-noise ratio must follow the user's changing attention; errors could lead to the desired source being suppressed as noise. A method for measuring the practical benefit of attention-following speech enhancement is described and used to show a benefit for gaze-directed beamforming over natural binaural hearing. First, participants watched a recorded video conference call between two people with six additional interfering voices in different directions.

Narrowband multi-source direction-of-arrival estimation in the spherical harmonic domain.

A conventional approach to wideband multi-source (MS) direction-of-arrival (DOA) estimation is to perform single source (SS) DOA estimation in time-frequency (TF) bins for which a SS assumption is valid. Such methods use the W-disjoint orthogonality (WDO) assumption due to the speech sparseness. As the number of sources increases, the chance of violating the WDO assumption increases.

Time-Frequency Analysis and Parameterisation of Knee Sounds for Non-Invasive Detection of Osteoarthritis.

Objective: In this work the potential of non-invasive detection of knee osteoarthritis is investigated using the sounds generated by the knee joint during walking.

Methods: The information contained in the time-frequency domain of these signals and its compressed representations is exploited and their discriminant properties are studied. Their efficacy for the task of normal vs abnormal signal classification is evaluated using a comprehensive experimental framework.

Spatial consistency for multiple source direction-of-arrival estimation and source counting.

A conventional approach to wideband multi-source (MS) direction-of-arrival (DOA) estimation is to perform single source (SS) DOA estimation in time-frequency (TF) bins for which a SS assumption is valid. The typical SS-validity confidence metrics analyse the validity of the SS assumption over a fixed-size TF region local to the TF bin. The performance of such methods degrades as the number of simultaneously active sources increases due to the associated decrease in the size of the TF regions where the SS assumption is valid.

Personalized signal-independent beamforming for binaural hearing aids.

The effect of personalized microphone array calibration on the performance of hearing aid beamformers under noisy reverberant conditions is studied. The study makes use of a new, publicly available, database containing acoustic transfer function measurements from 29 loudspeakers arranged on a sphere to a pair of behind-the-ear hearing aids in a listening room when worn by 27 males, 14 females, and 4 mannequins. Bilateral and binaural beamformers are designed using each participant's hearing aid head-related impulse responses (HAHRIRs).

Robust and efficient Bayesian adaptive psychometric function estimation.

The efficient measurement of the threshold and slope of the psychometric function (PF) is an important objective in psychoacoustics. This paper proposes a procedure that combines a Bayesian estimate of the PF with either a look one-ahead or a look two-ahead method of selecting the next stimulus presentation. The procedure differs from previously proposed algorithms in two respects: (i) it does not require the range of possible PF parameters to be specified in advance and (ii) the sequence of probe signal-to-noise ratios optimizes the threshold and slope estimates at a performance level, ϕ, that can be chosen by the experimenter.

Statistical analysis of the autoregressive modeling of reverberant speech.

Hands-free speech input is required in many modern telecommunication applications that employ autoregressive (AR) techniques such as linear predictive coding. When the hands-free input is obtained in enclosed reverberant spaces such as typical office rooms, the speech signal is distorted by the room transfer function. This paper utilizes theoretical results from statistical room acoustics to analyze the AR modeling of speech under these reverberant conditions.