Spatial Audio Signal Processing
Modern communication systems have fundamentally changed how people communicate, collaborate, interact and socialize. To date, remote communication remains less natural and more fatiguing compared to face-to-face communication. The vision of immersive communication is to enable natural experiences and interactions among people as if they were present in the same room.
Spatial audio processing plays a key role in creating immersive communication systems. Multiple microphones, for example, allow us to selectively capture sounds while multiple loudspeakers allow us to create completely immersive sound experiences. These sound capturing techniques can also be used to increase the performance of automatic speech recognition systems in noisy and reverberant conditions.
The mission of the Spatial Audio Processing (SAP) group headed by Prof. Dr. Emanuël Habets is to conduct fundamental and applied research and develop novel techniques and algorithms enabling high-quality audio recording and reproduction. In particular, we focus on speech enhancement (i.e., echo, noise and reverberation reduction), spotforming, acoustic scene analysis, up and down-mixing, cross-talk cancellation, sound reinforcement, and sound field control.
The SAP group works closely with the "Audio for Communications" and "Semantic Audio Processing" departments at the Audio and Multimedia division of Fraunhofer IIS. Moreover, the SAP group closely collaborates with the "Audio Signal Analysis" group headed by Prof. Dr. Bernd Edler.