Rate-constrained multi-microphone noise reduction for hearing aid devices

Many people around the world suffer from hearing problems (In the Netherlands, around 11%of the population is considered hearing-impaired). To overcome their hearing problems, advanced technologies like hearing aid devices can be used. Hearing aids are meant to assist the hearing-impaired to improve the speech intelligibility and the quality of...

Accurate structural health monitoring in composites: With fibre Bragg grating sensors

Compared to metals, composite materials offer higher stiffness, more resilience to corrosion, have lighter weights, and their mechanical properties can be tailored by their layup configuration. Despite these features, composite materials are susceptible to a diversity of damages, including matrix cracks, delamination, and fibre breakage. If...

Energy-aware noise reduction for wireless acoustic sensor networks

In speech processing applications, e.g., speech recognition, hearing aids (HAs), video conferencing, and human-computer interaction, speech enhancement or noise reduction is an essential front-end task, as the recorded speech signals are inevitably corrupted by interference, including coherent/incoherent noise and reverberation. Traditional...

Distributed Convex Optimization: Based on Monotone Operator Theory

Following their conception in the mid twentieth century, the world of computers has evolved from a landscape of isolated entities into a sprawling web of interconnected machines. Yet, given this evolution, many of the methods we use for allowing computers to work together still reflect their inherently isolated origins with the aggregation of...

Multi-Microphone Noise Reduction for Hearing Assistive Devices

The paramount importance of good hearing in everyday life has driven an exploration into the improvement of hearing capabilities of (hearing impaired) people in acoustic challenging situations using hearing assistive devices (HADs). HADs are small portable devices, which primarily aim at improving the intelligibility of an acoustic source that...

Low-complexity computer simulation of multichannel room impulse responses

The "telephone'' model has been, for the last one hundred thirty years, the base of modern telecommunications with virtually no changes in its fundamental concept. The arise of smaller and more powerful computing devices have opened new possibilities. For example, to build systems able to give to the user the illusion of being talking to the...

Advances in DFT-Based Single-Microphone Speech Enhancement

The interest in the field of speech enhancement emerges from the increased usage of digital speech processing applications like mobile telephony, digital hearing aids and human-machine communication systems in our daily life. The trend to make these applications mobile increases the variety of potential sources for quality degradation. Speech...

Multiple-description lattice vector quantization

In this thesis we construct and analyze index-assignment based multiple-description coding schemes.

Rate-Distortion Optimal Time-Frequency Decompositions for MDCT-based Audio Coding

Abstract not available