TASLP Volume 28 | 2020

This article addresses the problem of distance estimation using binaural hearing aid microphones in reverberant rooms. Among several distance indicators, the direct-to-reverberant energy ratio (DRR) has been shown to be more effective than other features. Therefore, we present two novel approaches to estimate the DRR of binaural signals.

Visual cues such as lip movements, when available, play an important role in speech communication. They are especially helpful for the hearing impaired population or in noisy environments. When not available, having a system to automatically generate talking faces in sync with input speech would enhance speech communication and enable many novel applications. 

Automatic evaluation of singing quality can be done with the help of a reference singing or the digital sheet music of the song. However, such a standard reference is not always available. In this article, we propose a framework to rank a large pool of singers according to their singing quality without any standard reference.

Wireless acoustic sensor networks (WASNs) can be used for centralized multi-microphone noise reduction, where the processing is done in a fusion center (FC). To perform the noise reduction, the data needs to be transmitted to the FC. Considering the limited battery life of the devices in a WASN, the total data rate at which the FC can communicate with the different network devices should be constrained.