Details of Grant 

EPSRC Reference:	GR/S66954/01
Title:	Enhancement of Reverberant Speech for Telecommunication Applications
Principal Investigator:	Naylor, Professor PA
Other Investigators:	Ward, Dr D
Researcher Co-Investigators:
Project Partners:	Trinity Convergence Ltd
Department:	Electrical and Electronic Engineering
Organisation:	Imperial College London
Scheme:	Standard Research (Pre-FEC)
Starts:	09 August 2004	Ends:	08 February 2008	Value (£):	225,565
EPSRC Research Topic Classifications:	Digital Signal Processing
EPSRC Industrial Sector Classifications:	Communications
Related Grants:
Panel History:
Summary on Grant Application Form
This project addresses the need for new algorithms in speech enhancement for voice-friendly terminals including personal digital assistants, wireline and wireless telephony and conferencing systems, the development of which is being driven in part by Vol P and 3G technology. Much excellent work has already been undertaken on speech enhancement, however the problem of dereverberation has not been so widely addressed and yet is crucial to customer acceptance of hands-free devices - hands-free speech is often criticised by users as sounding unsatisfactorily distant and/or echoey.The dereverberation problem is a particularly difficult blind deconvolution problem and is unlikely to be amenable to a full direct solution. Therefore, in this project we propose to develop robust approximate solutions to the dereverberation problem with the intention of creating the sensation of listening to speech from a close talking microphone even when a hands-free terminal is employed, for which the microphone may be in the region of one metre from the talker.The project will study (a) algorithms employing AR modelling with residual enhancement and (b) blind channel identification techniques. Some preliminary work has already be conducted by the investigators and this will form the basis of the project. A specific evaluation methodology is.proposed that is tailored to the requirement for perceptually significant assessment of the results.
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Organisation Website:	http://www.imperial.ac.uk