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  • Conference paper
    Lightburn L, De Sena E, Moore AH, Naylor PA, Brookes Det al., 2017,

    Improving the perceptual quality of ideal binary masked speech

    , 2017 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP), Publisher: Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), Pages: 661-665, ISSN: 1520-6149

    It is known that applying a time-frequency binary mask to very noisy speech can improve its intelligibility but results in poor perceptual quality. In this paper we propose a new approach to applying a binary mask that combines the intelligibility gains of conventional binary masking with the perceptual quality gains of a classical speech enhancer. The binary mask is not applied directly as a time-frequency gain as in most previous studies. Instead, the mask is used to supply prior information to a classical speech enhancer about the probability of speech presence in different time-frequency regions. Using an oracle ideal binary mask, we show that the proposed method results in a higher predicted quality than other methods of applying a binary mask whilst preserving the improvements in predicted intelligibility.
  • Conference paper
    Hafezi S, Moore AH, Naylor P, 2017,

    Multiple source localization using estimation consistency in the time-frequency domain

    , 2017 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP), Publisher: Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), Pages: 516-520, ISSN: 1520-6149

    The extraction of multiple Direction-of-Arrival (DoA) information from estimated spatial spectra can be challenging when such spectra are noisy or the sources are adjacent. Smoothing or clustering techniques are typically used to remove the effect of noise or irregular peaks in the spatial spectra. As we will explain and show in this paper, the smoothing-based techniques require prior knowledge of minimum angular separation of the sources and the clustering-based techniques fail on noisy spatial spectrum. A broad class of localization techniques give direction estimates in each Time Frequency (TF) bin. Using this information as input, a novel technique for obtaining robust localization of multiple simultaneous sources is proposed using Estimation Consistency (EC) in the TF domain. The method is evaluated in the context of spherical microphone arrays. This technique does not require prior knowledge of the sources and by removing the noise in the estimated spatial spectrum makes clustering a reliable and robust technique for multiple DoA extraction from estimated spatial spectra. The results indicate that the proposed technique has the strongest robustness to separation with up to 10° median error for 5° to 180° separation for 2 and 3 sources, compared to the baseline and the state-of-the-art techniques.
  • Conference paper
    Moore AH, Brookes D, Naylor PA, 2017,

    Robust spherical harmonic domain interpolation of spatially sampled array manifolds

    , IEEE International Conference on Acoustics Speech and Signal Processing, Publisher: Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), Pages: 521-525, ISSN: 1520-6149

    Accurate interpolation of the array manifold is an important firststep for the acoustic simulation of rapidly moving microphone ar-rays. Spherical harmonic domain interpolation has been proposedand well studied in the context of head-related transfer functions buthas focussed on perceptual, rather than numerical, accuracy. In thispaper we analyze the effect of measurement noise on spatial aliasing.Based on this analysis we propose a method for selecting the trunca-tion orders for the forward and reverse spherical Fourier transformsgiven only the noisy samples in such a way that the interpolationerror is minimized. The proposed method achieves up to 1.7 dB im-provement over the baseline approach.
  • Conference paper
    Xue W, Brookes M, Naylor PA, 2017,

    Frequency-domain under-modelled blind system identification based on cross power spectrum and sparsity regularization

    , IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing, Pages: 591-595, ISSN: 1520-6149

    © 2017 IEEE. In room acoustics, under-modelled multichannel blind system identification (BSI) aims to estimate the early part of the room impulse responses (RIRs), and it can be widely used in applications such as speaker localization, room geometry identification and beamforming based speech dereverberation. In this paper we extend our recent study on under-modelled BSI from the time domain to the frequency domain, such that the RIRs can be updated frame-wise and the efficiency of Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) is exploited to reduce the computational complexity. Analogous to the cross-correlation based criterion in the time domain, a frequency-domain cross power spectrum based criterion is proposed. As the early RIRs are usually sparse, the RIRs are estimated by jointly maximizing the cross power spectrum based criterion in the frequency domain and minimizing the l 1 -norm sparsity measure in the time domain. A two-stage LMS updating algorithm is derived to achieve joint optimization of these two targets. The experimental results in different under-modelled scenarios demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.
  • Conference paper
    Löllmann HW, Moore AH, Naylor PA, Rafaely B, Horaud R, Mazel A, Kellermann Wet al., 2017,

    Microphone array signal processing for robot audition

    , 2017 Hands-free Speech Communications and Microphone Arrays (HSCMA), Publisher: IEEE, Pages: 51-55

    Robot audition for humanoid robots interacting naturally with humans in an unconstrained real-world environment is a hitherto unsolved challenge. The recorded microphone signals are usually distorted by background and interfering noise sources (speakers) as well as room reverberation. In addition, the movements of a robot and its actuators cause ego-noise which degrades the recorded signals significantly. The movement of the robot body and its head also complicates the detection and tracking of the desired, possibly moving, sound sources of interest. This paper presents an overview of the concepts in microphone array processing for robot audition and some recent achievements.
  • Conference paper
    Hafezi S, Moore AH, Naylor PA, 2017,

    Multi-source estimation consistency for improved multiple direction-of-arrival estimation

    , Joint Workshop on Hands-free Speech Communication and Microphone Arrays, Publisher: IEEE, Pages: 81-85

    In Direction-of-Arrival (DOA) estimation for multiple sources, removal of noisy data points from a set of local DOA estimates increases the resulting estimation accuracy, especially when there are many sources and they have small angular separation. In this work, we propose a post-processing technique for the enhancement of DOA extraction from a set of local estimates using the consistency of these estimates within the time frame based on adaptive multi-source assumption. Simulations in a realistic reverberant environment with sensor noise and up to 5 sources demonstrate that the proposed technique outperforms the baseline and state-of-the-art approaches. In these tests the proposed technique had the worst average error of 9°, robustness of 5° to widely varying source separation and 3° to number of sources.
  • Journal article
    Doire CSJ, Brookes DM, Naylor PA, 2017,

    Robust and efficient Bayesian adaptive psychometric function estimation

    , Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, Vol: 141, Pages: 2501-2512, ISSN: 0001-4966

    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. Simulation results show that the proposed procedure is robust and that the estimates of both threshold and slope have a consistently low bias. Over a wide range of listener PF parameters, the root-mean-square errors after 50 trials were ∼1.2 dB in threshold and 0.14 in log-slope. It was found that the performance differences between the look one-ahead and look two-ahead methods were negligible and that an entropy-based criterion for selecting the next stimulus was preferred to a variance-based criterion.
  • Journal article
    Doire CSJ, Brookes DM, Naylor PA, Hicks CM, Betts D, Dmour MA, Jensen SHet al., 2017,

    Single-channel online enhancement of speech corrupted by reverberation and noise

    , IEEE/ACM Transactions on Audio, Speech and Language Processing, Vol: 25, Pages: 572-587, ISSN: 2329-9290

    This paper proposes an online single-channel speech enhancement method designed to improve the quality of speech degraded by reverberation and noise. Based on an autoregressive model for the reverberation power and on a hidden Markov model for clean speech production, a Bayesian filtering formulation of the problem is derived and online joint estimation of the acoustic parameters and mean speech, reverberation, and noise powers is obtained in mel-frequency bands. From these estimates, a real-valued spectral gain is derived and spectral enhancement is applied in the short-time Fourier transform (STFT) domain. The method yields state-of-the-art performance and greatly reduces the effects of reverberation and noise while improving speech quality and preserving speech intelligibility in challenging acoustic environments.
  • Conference paper
    Moore AH, Evers C, Naylor PA, 2016,

    2D direction of arrival estimation of multiple moving sources using a spherical microphone array

    , European Signal Processing Conference, Publisher: IEEE, ISSN: 2219-5491

    Direction of arrival estimation using a spherical microphonearray is an important and growing research area. One promisingalgorithm is the recently proposed Subspace PseudoIntensityVector method. In this contribution the SubspacePseudo-Intensity Vector method is combined with a state-ofthe-artmethod for robustly estimating the centres of mass in a2D histogram based on matching pursuits. The performanceof the improved Subspace Pseudo-Intensity Vector method isevaluated in the context of localising multiple moving sourceswhere it is shown to outperform competing methods in termsof clutter rate and the number of missed detections whilstremaining comparable in terms of localisation accuracy.
  • Conference paper
    Evers C, Moore A, Naylor P, 2016,

    Localization of Moving Microphone Arrays from Moving Sound Sources for Robot Audition

    , European Signal Processing Conference (EUSIPCO), Publisher: IEEE, ISSN: 2076-1465

    Acoustic Simultaneous Localization and Mapping(a-SLAM) jointly localizes the trajectory of a microphone arrayinstalled on a moving platform, whilst estimating the acousticmap of surrounding sound sources, such as human speakers.Whilst traditional approaches for SLAM in the vision and opticalresearch literature rely on the assumption that the surroundingmap features are static, in the acoustic case the positions oftalkers are usually time-varying due to head rotations and bodymovements. This paper demonstrates that tracking of movingsources can be incorporated in a-SLAM by modelling the acousticmap as a Random Finite Set (RFS) of multiple sources andexplicitly imposing models of the source dynamics. The proposedapproach is verified and its performance evaluated for realisticsimulated data.
  • Conference paper
    Hafezi S, Moore AH, Naylor PA, 2016,

    Multiple source localization in the spherical harmonic domain using augmented intensity vectors based on grid search

    , European Signal Processing Conference, Publisher: IEEE, ISSN: 2219-5491

    Multiple source localization is an important task in acousticsignal processing with applications including dereverberation,source separation, source tracking and environmentmapping. When using spherical microphone arrays, it hasbeen previously shown that Pseudo-intensity Vectors (PIV),and Augmented Intensity Vectors (AIV), are an effective approachfor direction of arrival estimation of a sound source.In this paper, we evaluate AIV-based localization in acousticscenarios involving multiple sound sources. Simulations areconducted where the number of sources, their angular separationand the reverberation time of the room are varied. Theresults indicate that AIV outperforms PIV and Steered ResponsePower (SRP) with an average accuracy between 5 and10 degrees for sources with angular separation of 30 degreesor more. AIV also shows better robustness to reverberationtime than PIV and SRP.
  • Conference paper
    Xue W, Brookes DM, Naylor PA, 2016,

    Under-modelled blind system identification for time delay estimation in reverberant environments

    , 15th International Workshop on Acoustic Signal Enhancement (IWAENC), Publisher: IEEE

    In multichannel systems, acoustic time delay estimation (TDE) is a challenging problem in reverberant environments. Although blind system identification (BSI) based methods have been proposed which utilize a realistic signal model for the room impulse response (RIR), their TDE performance depends strongly on that of the BSI, which is often inaccurate in practice when the identified responses are under-modelled. In this paper, we propose a new under-modelled BSI based method for TDE in reverberant environments. An under-modelled BSI algorithm is derived, which is based on maximizing the cross-correlation of the cross-filtered signals rather than minimizing the cross-relation error, and also exploits the sparsity of the early part of the RIR. For TDE, this new criterion can be viewed as a generalization of conventional cross-correlation-based TDE methods by considering a more realistic model for the early RIR. Depending on the microphone spacing, only a short early part of each RIR is identified, and the time delays are estimated based on the peak locations in the identified early RIRs. Experiments in different reverberant environments with speech source signals demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.
  • Journal article
    Moore AH, Evers C, Naylor PA, 2016,

    Direction of Arrival Estimation in the Spherical Harmonic Domain using Subspace Pseudo-Intensity Vectors

    , IEEE/ACM Transactions on Audio, Speech, and Language Processing, Vol: 25, Pages: 178-192, ISSN: 2329-9290

    Direction of Arrival (DOA) estimation is a fundamental problem in acoustic signal processing. It is used in a diverse range of applications, including spatial filtering, speech dereverberation, source separation and diarization. Intensity vector-based DOA estimation is attractive, especially for spherical sensor arrays, because it is computationally efficient. Two such methods are presented which operate on a spherical harmonic decomposition of a sound field observed using a spherical microphone array. The first uses Pseudo-Intensity Vectors (PIVs) and works well in acoustic environments where only one sound source is active at any time. The second uses Subspace Pseudo-Intensity Vectors (SSPIVs) and is targeted at environments where multiple simultaneous sources and significant levels of reverberation make the problem more challenging. Analytical models are used to quantify the effects of an interfering source, diffuse noise and sensor noise on PIVs and SSPIVs. The accuracy of DOA estimation using PIVs and SSPIVs is compared against the state-of-the-art in simulations including realistic reverberation and noise for single and multiple, stationary and moving sources. Finally, robust performance of the proposed methods is demonstrated using speech recordings in real acoustic environments.
  • Conference paper
    Moore AH, Naylor P, 2016,

    Linear prediction based dereverberation for spherical microphone arrays

    , 15th International Workshop on Acoustic Signal Enhancement (IWAENC), Publisher: IEEE

    Dereverberation is an important preprocessing step in manyspeech systems, both for human and machine listening. Inmany situations, including robot audition, the sound sourcesof interest can be incident from any direction. In such circumstances,a spherical microphone array allows direction of arrivalestimation which is free of spatial aliasing and directionindependentbeam patterns can be formed. This contributionformulates the Weighted Prediction Error algorithm in thespherical harmonic domain and compares the performance toa space domain implementation. Simulation results demonstratethat performing dereverberation in the spherical harmonicdomain allows many more microphones to be usedwithout increasing the computational cost. The benefit ofusing many microphones is particularly apparent at low signalto noise ratios, where for the conditions tested up to 71%improvement in speech-to-reverberation modulation ratio wasachieved.
  • Conference paper
    Xue W, Brookes M, Naylor PA, 2016,

    Cross-Correlation Based Under-Modelled Multichannel Blind Acoustic System Identification with Sparsity Regularization

    , 24th European Signal Processing Conference (EUSIPCO), Publisher: IEEE, Pages: 718-722, ISSN: 2076-1465
  • Journal article
    Eaton DJ, Gaubitch ND, Moore AH, Naylor PAet al., 2016,

    Estimation of room acoustic parameters: the ACE challenge

    , IEEE Transactions on Audio Speech and Language Processing, Vol: 24, Pages: 1681-1693, ISSN: 2329-9290

    Reverberation Time (T60) and Direct-to-Reverberant Ratio (DRR) are important parameters which together can characterize sound captured by microphones in non-anechoic rooms. These parameters are important in speech processing applications such as speech recognition and dereverberation. The values of T60 and DRR can be estimated directly from the Acoustic Impulse Response (AIR) of the room. In practice, the AIR isnot normally available, in which case these parameters must be estimated blindly from the observed speech in the microphone signal. The Acoustic Characterization of Environments (ACE) Challenge aimed to determine the state-of-the-art in blind acoustic parameter estimation and also to stimulate research in this area. A summary of the ACE Challenge, and the corpusused in the challenge is presented together with an analysis of the results. Existing algorithms were submitted alongside novel contributions, the comparative results for which are presented in this paper. The challenge showed that T60 estimation is a mature field where analytical approaches dominate whilst DRR estimation is a less mature field where machine learning approaches are currently more successful.
  • Patent
    Eaton DJ, Moore AH, Naylor PA, Skoglund Jet al., 2016,

    Reverberation estimator

    , US20160118038 A1

    Provided are methods and systems for generating Direct-to-Reverberant Ratio (DRR) estimates. The methods and systems use a null-steered beamformer to produce accurate DRR estimates across a variety of room sizes, reverberation times, and source-receiver distances. The DRR estimation algorithm uses spatial selectivity to separate direct and reverberant energy and account for noise separately. The formulation considers the response of the beamformer to reverberant sound and the effect of noise. The DRR estimation algorithm is more robust to background noise than existing approaches, and is applicable where a signal is recorded with two or more microphones, such as with mobile communications devices, laptop computers, and the like.
  • Journal article
    Sharma D, Naylor PA, Wang Y, Brookes DMet al., 2016,

    A Data-Driven Non-intrusive Measure of Speech Quality and Intelligibility

    , Speech Communication, Vol: 80, Pages: 84-94, ISSN: 0167-6393

    Speech signals are often affected by additive noiseand distortion which can degrade the perceived quality andintelligibility of the signal. We present a new measure, NISA, forestimating the quality and intelligibility of speech degraded byadditive noise and distortions associated with telecommunicationsnetworks, based on a data driven framework of feature extractionand tree based regression. The new measure is non-intrusive,operating on the degraded signal alone without the need for areference signal. This makes the measure applicable to practicalspeech processing applications operating in the single-endedmode. The new measure has been evaluated against the intrusivemeasures PESQ and STOI. The results indicate that the accuracyof the new non-intrusive method is around 90% of the accuracy ofthe intrusive measures, depending on the test scenario. The NISAmeasure therefore provides non-intrusive (single-ended) PESQand STOI estimates with high accuracy.
  • Conference paper
    Javed HA, Moore AH, Naylor PA, 2016,

    Spherical microphone array acoustic rake receivers

    , ICASSP, 2016 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing, Publisher: IEEE, Pages: 111-115, ISSN: 0736-7791

    Several signal independent acoustic rake receivers are proposed for speech dereverberation using spherical microphone arrays. The proposed rake designs take advantage of multipaths, by separately capturing and combining early reflections with the direct path. We investigate several approaches in combining reflections with the direct path source signal, including the development of beam patterns that point nulls at all preceding reflections. The proposed designs are tested in experimental simulations and their dereverberation performances evaluated using objective measures. For the tested configuration, the proposed designs achieve higher levels of dereverberation compared to conventional signal independent beamforming systems; achieving up to 3.6 dB improvement in the direct-to-reverberant ratio over the plane-wave decomposition beamformer.
  • Conference paper
    Evers C, Moore AH, Naylor PA, 2016,

    Acoustic simultaneous localization and mapping (A-SLAM) of a moving microphone array and its surrounding speakers

    , 2016 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP), Publisher: IEEE, Pages: 6-10, ISSN: 1520-6149

    Acoustic scene mapping creates a representation of positions of audio sources such as talkers within the surrounding environment of a microphone array. By allowing the array to move, the acoustic scene can be explored in order to improve the map. Furthermore, the spatial diversity of the kinematic array allows for estimation of the source-sensor distance in scenarios where source directions of arrival are measured. As sound source localization is performed relative to the array position, mapping of acoustic sources requires knowledge of the absolute position of the microphone array in the room. If the array is moving, its absolute position is unknown in practice. Hence, Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) is required in order to localize the microphone array position and map the surrounding sound sources. In realistic environments, microphone arrays receive a convolutive mixture of direct-path speech signals, noise and reflections due to reverberation. A key challenge of Acoustic SLAM (a-SLAM) is robustness against reverberant clutter measurements and missing source detections. This paper proposes a novel bearing-only a-SLAM approach using a Single-Cluster Probability Hypothesis Density filter. Results demonstrate convergence to accurate estimates of the array trajectory and source positions.

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