Erich Zwyssig (University of Edinburgh)“Speech Processing Using Digital MEMS Microphones” (2013)

Erich Zwyssig (University of Edinburgh)“Speech Processing Using Digital MEMS Microphones”, Advisor: Dr. Steve Renals and Dr. Mike Lincoln(2013)

The last few years have seen the start of a unique change in microphones for consumer devices such as smartphones or tablets. Almost all analogue capacitive microphones are being replaced by digital silicon microphones or MEMS microphones. MEMS microphones perform differently to conventional analogue microphones. Their greatest disadvantage is significantly increased self-noise or decreased SNR, while their most significant benefits are ease of design and manufacturing and improved sensitivity matching. This thesis presents research on speech processing, comparing conventional analogue microphones with the newly available digital MEMS microphones. Specifically, voice activity detection, speaker diarisation (who spoke when), speech separation and speech recognition are looked at in detail.

For details, please contact the author or view the full thesis.