Springer Topics in Signal Processing – serie

This book provides a comprehensive introduction to the theory and practice of spherical microphone arrays, and was written for graduate students, researchers and engineers who work with spherical microphone arrays in a wide range of applications. The new edition includes additions and modifications, and references supplementary Matlab code to provide the reader with a straightforward start for own implementations. The book is also accompanied by a Matlab manual, which explains how to implement the examples and simulations presented in the book.The first two chapters provide the reader with the necessary mathematical and physical background, including an introduction to the spherical Fourier transform and the formulation of plane-wave sound fields in the spherical harmonic domain. In turn, the third chapter covers the theory of spatial sampling, employed when selecting the positions of microphones to sample sound pressure functions in space.Subsequent chapters highlight various spherical array configurations, including the popular rigid-sphere-based configuration. Beamforming (spatial filtering) in the spherical harmonics domain, including axis-symmetric beamforming, and the performance measures of directivity index and white noise gain are introduced, and a range of optimal beamformers for spherical arrays, including those that achieve maximum directivity and maximum robustness are developed, along with the Dolph–Chebyshev beamformer. The final chapter discusses more advanced beamformers, such as MVDR (minimum variance distortionless response) and LCMV (linearly constrained minimum variance) types, which are tailored to the measured sound field.Mathworks kindly distributes the Matlab sources for this book on https://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/fileexchange/68655-fundamentals-of-spherical-array-processing.

The focus of this book is on array processing and beamforming with Kronecker products. It considers a large family of sensor arrays that allow the steering vector to be decomposed as a Kronecker product of two steering vectors of smaller virtual arrays. Instead of directly designing a global beamformer for the original array, once the steering vector has been decomposed, smaller virtual beamformers are designed and separately optimized for each virtual array. This means the matrices that need to be inverted are smaller, which increases the robustness of the beamformers, and reduces the size of the observations.The book explains how to perform beamforming with Kronecker product filters using an unconventional approach. It shows how the Kronecker product formulation can be used to derive fixed, adaptive, and differential beamformers with remarkable flexibility. Furthermore, it demonstrates how fixed and adaptive beamformers can be intelligently combined, optimally exploiting theadvantages of both. The problem of spatiotemporal signal enhancement is also addressed, and readers will learn how to perform Kronecker product filtering in this context.

This open access book provides a concise explanation of the fundamentals and background of the surround sound recording and playback technology Ambisonics. It equips readers with the psychoacoustical, signal processing, acoustical, and mathematical knowledge needed to understand the inner workings of modern processing utilities, special equipment for recording, manipulation, and reproduction in the higher-order Ambisonic format. The book comes with various practical examples based on free software tools and open scientific data for reproducible research.The book’s introductory section offers a perspective on Ambisonics spanning from the origins of coincident recordings in the 1930s to the Ambisonic concepts of the 1970s, as well as classical ways of applying Ambisonics in first-order coincident sound scene recording and reproduction that have been practiced since the 1980s. As, from time to time, the underlying mathematics become quite involved, but should be comprehensive without sacrificing readability, the book includes an extensive mathematical appendix. The book offers readers a deeper understanding of Ambisonic technologies, and will especially benefit scientists, audio-system and audio-recording engineers.In the advanced sections of the book, fundamentals and modern techniques as higher-order Ambisonic decoding, 3D audio effects, and higher-order recording are explained. Those techniques are shown to be suitable to supply audience areas ranging from studio-sized to hundreds of listeners, or headphone-based playback, regardless whether it is live, interactive, or studio-produced 3D audio material.

This book studies the link between differential beamforming and differential equations which in turn enables the study of fundamental theory and methods of beamforming from a different perspective, leading to new insights into the problem and new methods to solve the problem. The book first presents a brief overview of the problems and methods for beamforming and some performance measures popularly used either to evaluate beamformers or to derive optimal beamformers. Then, first-order, second-order, and general high-order linear difference equations are discussed, based on which the authors show how to formulate the beamforming problem and derive different beamforming methods, including fixed and adaptive ones. Furthermore, the authors show how to apply the theory of difference equations to the general problem of speech enhancement, and deduce a number of noise reduction filters, including the maximum SNR filter, the Wiener filter, the MVDR filter, etc. Also covered in the book are thedifference equations and differential beamforming from the spectral graph perspective.Presents basic concepts, fundamental principles, and methods for beamforming from the perspective of linear difference equations;Provides formulation and methods of conventional beamforming, and first-order, second-order, and general high-order linear difference equations for beamforming;Includes the applications of linear difference equations to the problem of noise reduction;Explains beamforming based on difference equations with graphs.

This book studies the link between differential beamforming and differential equations which in turn enables the study of fundamental theory and methods of beamforming from a different perspective, leading to new insights into the problem and new methods to solve the problem. The book first presents a brief overview of the problems and methods for beamforming and some performance measures popularly used either to evaluate beamformers or to derive optimal beamformers. Then, first-order, second-order, and general high-order linear difference equations are discussed, based on which the authors show how to formulate the beamforming problem and derive different beamforming methods, including fixed and adaptive ones. Furthermore, the authors show how to apply the theory of difference equations to the general problem of speech enhancement, and deduce a number of noise reduction filters, including the maximum SNR filter, the Wiener filter, the MVDR filter, etc. Also covered in the book are thedifference equations and differential beamforming from the spectral graph perspective.Presents basic concepts, fundamental principles, and methods for beamforming from the perspective of linear difference equations;Provides formulation and methods of conventional beamforming, and first-order, second-order, and general high-order linear difference equations for beamforming;Includes the applications of linear difference equations to the problem of noise reduction;Explains beamforming based on difference equations with graphs.

The book provides an accessible overview of audio signal processing, and enables readers to design and write algorithms for the analysis, synthesis, and manipulation of musical and acoustic signals for any programming language. It provides an overview of highly interdisciplinary topics developed in a simple but rigorous way, and described in a unified and formal language which focuses on determining discrete-time audio signal models. Readers can find within a self-contained volume basic topics ranging over different disciplines: mechanical acoustics, physical systems and linear and nonlinear models, with lumped and distributed parameters; described and developed with the same level of mathematical formalism, easy to understand and oriented to the development of algorithms. Topics include the fundamental concepts of acoustic mechanics and vibration; the design of filters and equalizers for sound signals, the so-called audio effects, abstract methods of sound synthesis, and finally, methods of synthesis by physical modeling.

The book provides an accessible overview of audio signal processing, and enables readers to design and write algorithms for the analysis, synthesis, and manipulation of musical and acoustic signals for any programming language. It provides an overview of highly interdisciplinary topics developed in a simple but rigorous way, and described in a unified and formal language which focuses on determining discrete-time audio signal models. Readers can find within a self-contained volume basic topics ranging over different disciplines: mechanical acoustics, physical systems and linear and nonlinear models, with lumped and distributed parameters; described and developed with the same level of mathematical formalism, easy to understand and oriented to the development of algorithms. Topics include the fundamental concepts of acoustic mechanics and vibration; the design of filters and equalizers for sound signals, the so-called audio effects, abstract methods of sound synthesis, and finally, methods of synthesis by physical modeling.

This book explains the motivation for using microphone arrays as opposed to using a single sensor for sound acquisition. The book then goes on to summarize the most useful ideas, concepts, results, and new algorithms therein. The material presented in this work includes analysis of the advantages of using microphone arrays, including dimensionality reduction to remove the redundancy while preserving the variability of the array signals using the principal component analysis (PCA). The authors also discuss benefits such as beamforming with low-rank approximations, fixed, adaptive, and robust distortionless beamforming, differential beamforming, and a new form of binaural beamforming that takes advantage of both beamforming and human binaural hearing properties to improve speech intelligibility. The book makes the microphone array signal processing theory and applications available in a complete and self-contained text. The authors attempt to explain the main ideas in a clear and rigorous way so that the reader can easily capture the potentials, opportunities, challenges, and limitations of microphone array signal processing. This book is written for those who work on the topics of microphone arrays, noise reduction, speech enhancement, speech communication, and human-machine speech interfaces.

This book explains the motivation for using microphone arrays as opposed to using a single sensor for sound acquisition. The book then goes on to summarize the most useful ideas, concepts, results, and new algorithms therein. The material presented in this work includes analysis of the advantages of using microphone arrays, including dimensionality reduction to remove the redundancy while preserving the variability of the array signals using the principal component analysis (PCA). The authors also discuss benefits such as beamforming with low-rank approximations, fixed, adaptive, and robust distortionless beamforming, differential beamforming, and a new form of binaural beamforming that takes advantage of both beamforming and human binaural hearing properties to improve speech intelligibility. The book makes the microphone array signal processing theory and applications available in a complete and self-contained text. The authors attempt to explain the main ideas in a clear and rigorous way so that the reader can easily capture the potentials, opportunities, challenges, and limitations of microphone array signal processing. This book is written for those who work on the topics of microphone arrays, noise reduction, speech enhancement, speech communication, and human-machine speech interfaces.

This book presents a unified view of image motion analysis under the variational framework. Variational methods, rooted in physics and mechanics, but appearing in many other domains, such as statistics, control, and computer vision, address a problem from an optimization standpoint, i.e., they formulate it as the optimization of an objective function or functional. The methods of image motion analysis described in this book use the calculus of variations to minimize (or maximize) an objective functional which transcribes all of the constraints that characterize the desired motion variables. The book addresses the four core subjects of motion analysis: Motion estimation, detection, tracking, and three-dimensional interpretation. Each topic is covered in a dedicated chapter. The presentation is prefaced by an introductory chapter which discusses the purpose of motion analysis. Further, a chapter is included which gives the basic tools and formulae related to curvature, Euler Lagrange equations, unconstrained descent optimization, and level sets, that the variational image motion processing methods use repeatedly in the book.

Recently, we proposed a completely novel and efficient way to design differential beamforming algorithms for linear microphone arrays. Thanks to this very flexible approach, any order of differential arrays can be designed. Moreover, they can be made robust against white noise amplification, which is the main inconvenience in these types of arrays. The other well-known problem with linear arrays is that electronic steering is not really feasible.In this book, we extend all these fundamental ideas to circular microphone arrays and show that we can design small and compact differential arrays of any order that can be electronically steered in many different directions and offer a good degree of control of the white noise amplification problem, high directional gain, and frequency-independent response. We also present a number of practical examples, demonstrating that differential beamforming with circular microphone arrays is likely one of the best candidates for applications involving speech enhancement (i.e., noise reduction and dereverberation). Nearly all of the material presented is new and will be of great interest to engineers, students, and researchers working with microphone arrays and their applications in all types of telecommunications, security and surveillance contexts.

This book presents a unified view of image motion analysis under the variational framework. Variational methods, rooted in physics and mechanics, but appearing in many other domains, such as statistics, control, and computer vision, address a problem from an optimization standpoint, i.e., they formulate it as the optimization of an objective function or functional. The methods of image motion analysis described in this book use the calculus of variations to minimize (or maximize) an objective functional which transcribes all of the constraints that characterize the desired motion variables. The book addresses the four core subjects of motion analysis: Motion estimation, detection, tracking, and three-dimensional interpretation. Each topic is covered in a dedicated chapter. The presentation is prefaced by an introductory chapter which discusses the purpose of motion analysis. Further, a chapter is included which gives the basic tools and formulae related to curvature, Euler Lagrange equations, unconstrained descent optimization, and level sets, that the variational image motion processing methods use repeatedly in the book.

Recently, we proposed a completely novel and efficient way to design differential beamforming algorithms for linear microphone arrays. Thanks to this very flexible approach, any order of differential arrays can be designed. Moreover, they can be made robust against white noise amplification, which is the main inconvenience in these types of arrays. The other well-known problem with linear arrays is that electronic steering is not really feasible.In this book, we extend all these fundamental ideas to circular microphone arrays and show that we can design small and compact differential arrays of any order that can be electronically steered in many different directions and offer a good degree of control of the white noise amplification problem, high directional gain, and frequency-independent response. We also present a number of practical examples, demonstrating that differential beamforming with circular microphone arrays is likely one of the best candidates for applications involving speech enhancement (i.e., noise reduction and dereverberation). Nearly all of the material presented is new and will be of great interest to engineers, students, and researchers working with microphone arrays and their applications in all types of telecommunications, security and surveillance contexts.

This book presents the signal processing algorithms that have been developed to process the signals acquired by a spherical microphone array. Spherical microphone arrays can be used to capture the sound field in three dimensions and have received significant interest from researchers and audio engineers. Algorithms for spherical array processing are different to corresponding algorithms already known in the literature of linear and planar arrays because the spherical geometry can be exploited to great beneficial effect. The authors aim to advance the field of spherical array processing by helping those new to the field to study it efficiently and from a single source, as well as by offering a way for more experienced researchers and engineers to consolidate their understanding, adding either or both of breadth and depth. The level of the presentation corresponds to graduate studies at MSc and PhD level.This book begins with a presentation of some of the essential mathematical and physical theory relevant to spherical microphone arrays, and of an acoustic impulse response simulation method, which can be used to comprehensively evaluate spherical array processing algorithms in reverberant environments.The chapter on acoustic parameter estimation describes the way in which useful descriptions of acoustic scenes can be parameterized, and the signal processing algorithms that can be used to estimate the parameter values using spherical microphone arrays. Subsequent chapters exploit these parameters including in particular measures of direction-of-arrival and of diffuseness of a sound field. The array processing algorithms are then classified into two main classes, each described in a separate chapter. These are signal-dependent and signal-independent beamforming algorithms. Although signal-dependent beamforming algorithms are in theory able to provide better performance compared to the signal-independent algorithms, they are currently rarely used in practice. The main reason for this is that the statistical information required by these algorithms is difficult to estimate. In a subsequent chapter it is shown how the estimated acoustic parameters can be used in the design of signal-dependent beamforming algorithms. This final step closes, at least in part, the gap between theory and practice.

This book discusses the development of promising technologies for compact antennas for high data-rate communications. It discusses and analyzes the design of compact ultra-wideband (UWB) and multiple input, multiple output (MIMO) antennas, providing essential know-how for designers, practicing engineers and scientists.These wireless communication technologies enable consumers to have convenient access to a wide range of services – anytime, anywhere. And the introduction of wireless mobile access points eliminates the limitations to communication imposed by geographical location. The Internet has allowed people to access and share information much more rapidly, but in order to achieve higher data rates with the limited available resources and imposed constraints, wireless communication technology needs to be pushed beyond the physical limits of the propagation channel. This book contributes to achieving this goal.

This book presents the signal processing algorithms that have been developed to process the signals acquired by a spherical microphone array. Spherical microphone arrays can be used to capture the sound field in three dimensions and have received significant interest from researchers and audio engineers. Algorithms for spherical array processing are different to corresponding algorithms already known in the literature of linear and planar arrays because the spherical geometry can be exploited to great beneficial effect. The authors aim to advance the field of spherical array processing by helping those new to the field to study it efficiently and from a single source, as well as by offering a way for more experienced researchers and engineers to consolidate their understanding, adding either or both of breadth and depth. The level of the presentation corresponds to graduate studies at MSc and PhD level.This book begins with a presentation of some of the essential mathematical and physical theory relevant to spherical microphone arrays, and of an acoustic impulse response simulation method, which can be used to comprehensively evaluate spherical array processing algorithms in reverberant environments.The chapter on acoustic parameter estimation describes the way in which useful descriptions of acoustic scenes can be parameterized, and the signal processing algorithms that can be used to estimate the parameter values using spherical microphone arrays. Subsequent chapters exploit these parameters including in particular measures of direction-of-arrival and of diffuseness of a sound field. The array processing algorithms are then classified into two main classes, each described in a separate chapter. These are signal-dependent and signal-independent beamforming algorithms. Although signal-dependent beamforming algorithms are in theory able to provide better performance compared to the signal-independent algorithms, they are currently rarely used in practice. The main reason for this is that the statistical information required by these algorithms is difficult to estimate. In a subsequent chapter it is shown how the estimated acoustic parameters can be used in the design of signal-dependent beamforming algorithms. This final step closes, at least in part, the gap between theory and practice.

This book discusses the development of promising technologies for compact antennas for high data-rate communications. It discusses and analyzes the design of compact ultra-wideband (UWB) and multiple input, multiple output (MIMO) antennas, providing essential know-how for designers, practicing engineers and scientists.These wireless communication technologies enable consumers to have convenient access to a wide range of services – anytime, anywhere. And the introduction of wireless mobile access points eliminates the limitations to communication imposed by geographical location. The Internet has allowed people to access and share information much more rapidly, but in order to achieve higher data rates with the limited available resources and imposed constraints, wireless communication technology needs to be pushed beyond the physical limits of the propagation channel. This book contributes to achieving this goal.

This book provides a comprehensive introduction to the theory and practice of spherical microphone arrays, and was written for graduate students, researchers and engineers who work with spherical microphone arrays in a wide range of applications. The new edition includes additions and modifications, and references supplementary Matlab code to provide the reader with a straightforward start for own implementations. The book is also accompanied by a Matlab manual, which explains how to implement the examples and simulations presented in the book.The first two chapters provide the reader with the necessary mathematical and physical background, including an introduction to the spherical Fourier transform and the formulation of plane-wave sound fields in the spherical harmonic domain. In turn, the third chapter covers the theory of spatial sampling, employed when selecting the positions of microphones to sample sound pressure functions in space.Subsequent chapters highlight various spherical array configurations, including the popular rigid-sphere-based configuration. Beamforming (spatial filtering) in the spherical harmonics domain, including axis-symmetric beamforming, and the performance measures of directivity index and white noise gain are introduced, and a range of optimal beamformers for spherical arrays, including those that achieve maximum directivity and maximum robustness are developed, along with the Dolph–Chebyshev beamformer. The final chapter discusses more advanced beamformers, such as MVDR (minimum variance distortionless response) and LCMV (linearly constrained minimum variance) types, which are tailored to the measured sound field.Mathworks kindly distributes the Matlab sources for this book on https://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/fileexchange/68655-fundamentals-of-spherical-array-processing.

In the past few years we have written and edited several books in the area of acousticandspeechsignalprocessing. Thereasonbehindthisendeavoristhat there were almost no books available in the literature when we ?rst started while there was (and still is) a real need to publish manuscripts summarizing the most useful ideas, concepts, results, and state-of-the-art algorithms in this important area of research. According to all the feedback we have received so far, we can say that we were right in doing this. Recently, several other researchers have followed us in this journey and have published interesting books with their own visions and perspectives. The idea of writing a book on Microphone Array Signal Processing comes from discussions we have had with many colleagues and friends. As a c- sequence of these discussions, we came up with the conclusion that, again, there is an urgent need for a monograph that carefully explains the theory and implementation of microphone arrays. While there are many manuscripts on antenna arrays from a narrowband perspective (narrowband signals and narrowband processing), the literature is quite scarce when it comes to s- sor arrays explained from a truly broadband perspective. Many algorithms for speech applications were simply borrowed from narrowband antenna - rays. However, a direct application of narrowband ideas to broadband speech processing may not be necessarily appropriate and can lead to many m- understandings.

Noise is everywhere and in most applications that are related to audio and speech, such as human-machine interfaces, hands-free communications, voice over IP (VoIP), hearing aids, teleconferencing/telepresence/telecollaboration systems, and so many others, the signal of interest (usually speech) that is picked up by a microphone is generally contaminated by noise. As a result, the microphone signal has to be cleaned up with digital signal processing tools before it is stored, analyzed, transmitted, or played out. This cleaning process is often called noise reduction and this topic has attracted a considerable amount of research and engineering attention for several decades. One of the objectives of this book is to present in a common framework an overview of the state of the art of noise reduction algorithms in the single-channel (one microphone) case. The focus is on the most useful approaches, i.e., filtering techniques (in different domains) and spectral enhancement methods. The other objective of Noise Reduction in Speech Processing is to derive all these well-known techniques in a rigorous way and prove many fundamental and intuitive results often taken for granted. This book is especially written for graduate students and research engineers who work on noise reduction for speech and audio applications and want to understand the subtle mechanisms behind each approach. Many new and interesting concepts are presented in this text that we hope the readers will find useful and inspiring.

In the past few years we have written and edited several books in the area of acousticandspeechsignalprocessing. Thereasonbehindthisendeavoristhat there were almost no books available in the literature when we ?rst started while there was (and still is) a real need to publish manuscripts summarizing the most useful ideas, concepts, results, and state-of-the-art algorithms in this important area of research. According to all the feedback we have received so far, we can say that we were right in doing this. Recently, several other researchers have followed us in this journey and have published interesting books with their own visions and perspectives. The idea of writing a book on Microphone Array Signal Processing comes from discussions we have had with many colleagues and friends. As a c- sequence of these discussions, we came up with the conclusion that, again, there is an urgent need for a monograph that carefully explains the theory and implementation of microphone arrays. While there are many manuscripts on antenna arrays from a narrowband perspective (narrowband signals and narrowband processing), the literature is quite scarce when it comes to s- sor arrays explained from a truly broadband perspective. Many algorithms for speech applications were simply borrowed from narrowband antenna - rays. However, a direct application of narrowband ideas to broadband speech processing may not be necessarily appropriate and can lead to many m- understandings.

Noise is everywhere and in most applications that are related to audio and speech, such as human-machine interfaces, hands-free communications, voice over IP (VoIP), hearing aids, teleconferencing/telepresence/telecollaboration systems, and so many others, the signal of interest (usually speech) that is picked up by a microphone is generally contaminated by noise. As a result, the microphone signal has to be cleaned up with digital signal processing tools before it is stored, analyzed, transmitted, or played out. This cleaning process is often called noise reduction and this topic has attracted a considerable amount of research and engineering attention for several decades. One of the objectives of this book is to present in a common framework an overview of the state of the art of noise reduction algorithms in the single-channel (one microphone) case. The focus is on the most useful approaches, i.e., filtering techniques (in different domains) and spectral enhancement methods. The other objective of Noise Reduction in Speech Processing is to derive all these well-known techniques in a rigorous way and prove many fundamental and intuitive results often taken for granted. This book is especially written for graduate students and research engineers who work on noise reduction for speech and audio applications and want to understand the subtle mechanisms behind each approach. Many new and interesting concepts are presented in this text that we hope the readers will find useful and inspiring.

Modern communication devices, such as mobile phones, teleconferencing systems, VoIP, etc., are often used in noisy and reverberant environments. Therefore, signals picked up by the microphones from telecommunication devices contain not only the desired near-end speech signal, but also interferences such as the background noise, far-end echoes produced by the loudspeaker, and reverberations of the desired source. These interferences degrade the fidelity and intelligibility of the near-end speech in human-to-human telecommunications and decrease the performance of human-to-machine interfaces (i.e., automatic speech recognition systems).The proposed book deals with the fundamental challenges of speech processing in modern communication, including speech enhancement, interference suppression, acoustic echo cancellation, relative transfer function identification, source localization, dereverberation, and beamforming in reverberant environments.Enhancement of speech signals is necessary whenever the source signal is corrupted by noise. In highly non-stationary noise environments, noise transients, and interferences may be extremely annoying. Acoustic echo cancellation is used to eliminate the acoustic coupling between the loudspeaker and the microphone of a communication device. Identification of the relative transfer function between sensors in response to a desired speech signal enables to derive a reference noise signal for suppressing directional or coherent noise sources. Source localization, dereverberation, and beamforming in reverberant environments further enable to increase the intelligibility of the near-end speech signal.

Image segmentation consists of dividing an image domain into disjoint regions according to a characterization of the image within or in-between the regions. Therefore, segmenting an image is to divide its domain into relevant components. The efficient solution of the key problems in image segmentation promises to enable a rich array of useful applications. The current major application areas include robotics, medical image analysis, remote sensing, scene understanding, and image database retrieval. The subject of this book is image segmentation by variational methods with a focus on formulations which use closed regular plane curves to define the segmentation regions and on a level set implementation of the corresponding active curve evolution algorithms. Each method is developed from an objective functional which embeds constraints on both the image domain partition of the segmentation and the image data within or in-between the partition regions. The necessary conditions to optimize the objective functional are then derived and solved numerically. The book covers, within the active curve and level set formalism, the basic two-region segmentation methods, multiregion extensions, region merging, image modeling, and motion based segmentation. To treat various important classes of images, modeling investigates several parametric distributions such as the Gaussian, Gamma, Weibull, and Wishart. It also investigates non-parametric models. In motion segmentation, both optical flow and the movement of real three-dimensional objects are studied.

Single-channel hands-free teleconferencing systems are becoming popular. In order to enhance the communication quality of these systems, more and more stereophonic sound devices with two loudspeakers and two microphones are deployed. Because of the coupling between loudspeakers and microphones, there may be strong echoes, which make real-time communication very difficult. The best way we know to cancel these echoes is via a stereo acoustic echo canceller (SAEC), which can be modelled as a two-input/two-output system with real random variables. In this work, the authors recast this problem into a single-input/single-output system with complex random variables thanks to the widely linear model. From this new convenient formulation, they re-derive the most important aspects of a SAEC, including identification of the echo paths with adaptive filters, double-talk detection, and suppression.

Modern communication devices, such as mobile phones, teleconferencing systems, VoIP, etc., are often used in noisy and reverberant environments. Therefore, signals picked up by the microphones from telecommunication devices contain not only the desired near-end speech signal, but also interferences such as the background noise, far-end echoes produced by the loudspeaker, and reverberations of the desired source. These interferences degrade the fidelity and intelligibility of the near-end speech in human-to-human telecommunications and decrease the performance of human-to-machine interfaces (i.e., automatic speech recognition systems).The proposed book deals with the fundamental challenges of speech processing in modern communication, including speech enhancement, interference suppression, acoustic echo cancellation, relative transfer function identification, source localization, dereverberation, and beamforming in reverberant environments.Enhancement of speech signals is necessary whenever the source signal is corrupted by noise. In highly non-stationary noise environments, noise transients, and interferences may be extremely annoying. Acoustic echo cancellation is used to eliminate the acoustic coupling between the loudspeaker and the microphone of a communication device. Identification of the relative transfer function between sensors in response to a desired speech signal enables to derive a reference noise signal for suppressing directional or coherent noise sources. Source localization, dereverberation, and beamforming in reverberant environments further enable to increase the intelligibility of the near-end speech signal.

Image segmentation consists of dividing an image domain into disjoint regions according to a characterization of the image within or in-between the regions. Therefore, segmenting an image is to divide its domain into relevant components. The efficient solution of the key problems in image segmentation promises to enable a rich array of useful applications. The current major application areas include robotics, medical image analysis, remote sensing, scene understanding, and image database retrieval. The subject of this book is image segmentation by variational methods with a focus on formulations which use closed regular plane curves to define the segmentation regions and on a level set implementation of the corresponding active curve evolution algorithms. Each method is developed from an objective functional which embeds constraints on both the image domain partition of the segmentation and the image data within or in-between the partition regions. The necessary conditions to optimize the objective functional are then derived and solved numerically. The book covers, within the active curve and level set formalism, the basic two-region segmentation methods, multiregion extensions, region merging, image modeling, and motion based segmentation. To treat various important classes of images, modeling investigates several parametric distributions such as the Gaussian, Gamma, Weibull, and Wishart. It also investigates non-parametric models. In motion segmentation, both optical flow and the movement of real three-dimensional objects are studied.

Microphone arrays have attracted a lot of interest over the last few decades since they have the potential to solve many important problems such as noise reduction/speech enhancement, source separation, dereverberation, spatial sound recording, and source localization/tracking, to name a few. However, the design and implementation of microphone arrays with beamforming algorithms is not a trivial task when it comes to processing broadband signals such as speech. Indeed, in most sensor arrangements, the beamformer output tends to have a frequency-dependent response. One exception, perhaps, is the family of differential microphone arrays (DMAs) who have the promise to form frequency-independent responses. Moreover, they have the potential to attain high directional gains with small and compact apertures. As a result, this type of microphone arrays has drawn much research and development attention recently. This book is intended to provide a systematic study of DMAs from a signal processing perspective. The primary objective is to develop a rigorous but yet simple theoryfor the design, implementation, and performance analysis of DMAs. The theory includes some signal processing techniques for the design of commonly used first-order, second-order, third-order, and also the general Nth-order DMAs. For each order, particular examples are given on how to form standard directional patterns such as the dipole, cardioid, supercardioid, hypercardioid, subcardioid, and quadrupole. The study demonstrates the performance of the different order DMAs in terms of beampattern, directivity factor, white noise gain, and gain for point sources. The inherent relationship between differential processing and adaptive beamforming is discussed, which provides a better understanding of DMAs and why they can achieve high directional gain. Finally, we show how to design DMAs that can be robust against white noise amplification.

Microphone arrays have attracted a lot of interest over the last few decades since they have the potential to solve many important problems such as noise reduction/speech enhancement, source separation, dereverberation, spatial sound recording, and source localization/tracking, to name a few. However, the design and implementation of microphone arrays with beamforming algorithms is not a trivial task when it comes to processing broadband signals such as speech. Indeed, in most sensor arrangements, the beamformer output tends to have a frequency-dependent response. One exception, perhaps, is the family of differential microphone arrays (DMAs) who have the promise to form frequency-independent responses. Moreover, they have the potential to attain high directional gains with small and compact apertures. As a result, this type of microphone arrays has drawn much research and development attention recently. This book is intended to provide a systematic study of DMAs from a signal processing perspective. The primary objective is to develop a rigorous but yet simple theoryfor the design, implementation, and performance analysis of DMAs. The theory includes some signal processing techniques for the design of commonly used first-order, second-order, third-order, and also the general Nth-order DMAs. For each order, particular examples are given on how to form standard directional patterns such as the dipole, cardioid, supercardioid, hypercardioid, subcardioid, and quadrupole. The study demonstrates the performance of the different order DMAs in terms of beampattern, directivity factor, white noise gain, and gain for point sources. The inherent relationship between differential processing and adaptive beamforming is discussed, which provides a better understanding of DMAs and why they can achieve high directional gain. Finally, we show how to design DMAs that can be robust against white noise amplification.