News from the Audio and Acoustic Signal Processing (AASP)-TC

Signal Processing Magazine Special Issue

IEEE Signal Processing Magazine calls for papers of the Special Issue on "Signal Processing Techniques for Assisted Listening." This special issue focuses on technical challenges of assisted listening from a signal processing perspective. Prospective authors are invited to contribute tutorial and survey articles that articulate signal processing methodologies which are critical for applying assisted listening techniques to mobile phones and other communication devices. Of particular interest is the role of signal processing in combining multi-media content, voice communication and voice pick-up in various real-world settings. Guest Editors are Sven Nordholm (Curtin University), Walter Kellermann (University Erlangen-Nürnberg), Simon Doclo (University of Oldenburg), Vesa Välimäki (Aalto University), Shoji Makino (University of Tsukuba), John Hershey (Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories), all are AASP TC Members.

Conferences and Workshops

The AASP TC members, associate members, and affiliate members (reviewers) worked hard reviewing papers submitted to ICASSP2014 held in May, in Florence, Italy. Tomohiro Nakatani, the Review Subcommittee Chair, had spent lots of time on review coordination of 348 submissions in a short time. Malcolm Slaney, Michael Brandstein, Simon Doclo, Tomas Gänsler, Jean-Marc Jot, Shoji Makino, Bryan Pardo, Gäel Richard, Hiroshi Sawada, Paris Smagradis, and Akihiko (Ken) Sugiyama helped Tomohiro assign reviewers as area chairs who are responsible for their fields of expertise. The number of submissions to the AASP area marked a record high, demonstrating that AASP is a popular and growing area.

The AASP Technical Committee’s flagship workshop is the Workshop on Applications of Signal Processing to Audio and Acoustics (WASPAA). This is a bi-annual event held in odd years in October at Mohonk Mountain House in New Paltz, New York and is intended to stimulate discussions among those working in the AASP area with beautiful autumn leaves. The WASPAA2013 was held on October 20-23, 2013, chaired by Sharon Gannot and Emanuel Habets. The committee selected 87 papers for presentation from 148 submissions in total. The venue was full with 155 attendance. WASPAA2015 will be co-chaired by Gael Richard and Laurent Daudet and take place in October 2015 at the same venue.

The AASP TC is also deeply involved in the Joint Workshop on Hands-Free Speech Communication and Microphone Arrays (HSCMA), which is held once every three years. The HSCMA2014 was held in Nancy, France, on May 12-14, 2014, chaired by Emmanuel Vincent, in conjunction with ICASSP2014 and REVERB challenge. 3 keynotes took place and attendees was 81. The conference was supported by many industrials.

Many members of the AASP TC are deeply involved in the International Workshop on Acoustic Signal Enhancement (IWAENC). IWAENC is held bi-annually in even years, usually in and around the month of September. The IWAENC2014 will be held in French Riviera, France, on September 9-11, 2014, chaired by Dirk Slock and Christophe Beaugeant.

AASP Challenges

The AASP TC started a new activity, AASP Challenges directed by Patrick Naylor, Chair of AASP TC’s Challenges Subcommittee. It is to introduce a sequence of ‘challenges’ in order to encourage research and development with comparable and repeatable results, and to stimulate new ground‐breaking approaches to specific problems in our technical scope.

“Detection and Classification of Acoustic Scenes and Events (D-CASE)” was to develop systems that achieve comparable performance to that of human auditory system with the help of computational auditory scene analysis (CASA). This challenge was organized by Mark Plumbley, et al. The challenge ran successfully and attracted 18 participants. Results were presented at a special session in WASPAA2013; participants were invited to present a poster at a special session.

“Reverberant Voice Enhancement and Recognition Benchmark (REVERB)” challenge aimed at bringing together researchers from a broad range of disciplines to discuss novel and established approaches to handle reverberant speech. The approaches consist of reverberant speech signal processing, including both single- and multi-channel de-reverberation techniques, and automatic speech recognition (ASR) techniques robust to reverberation. The challenge provided an opportunity to the researchers in the field to carry out comprehensive evaluation of their methods based on a common database and evaluation metrics. Results were presented at a Workshop on May 10, 2014, in conjunction with ICASSP2014 and HSCMA2014. The Challenge run very successfully and attracted 27 participants, 110 audiences!

In the coming year, a new Challenge will be running: “Characterization of Acoustic Environments (ACE)”. Organizers are Nick Gaubitch from Delft University and James Eaton and Patrick Naylor from Imperial College London. This will have the dissemination event at ICASSP2015.

Job opportunities

A job market page has been popular with many visitors in the AASP TC Jobs Opportunities website. If there is any information about job openings, please direct it to the AASP webmaster, Patrick Naylor.

Published in TC News on 1 Aug 2014