PhD studentship at Stirling University (Scotland)

[Leslie Smith <l.s.smith@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Dear all:

Bio-inspired Feature Detection for Sound Streaming and Interpretation

This Department has set aside funds to fund a 3 year PhD studentship  
(UK/EC students only) starting as soon as possible.

This project aims to develop biologically inspired techniques for the  
detection of spectro-temporal features in sound which may be used (i)  
for separating foreground sound streams from background sound streams  
and (ii) for the interpretation of the foreground sound streams. Most  
current work is speech recognition based, and assumes (incorrectly)  
that the speech is the only signal present. In recent years there has  
been work on Computer Audio Scene Analysis (CASA), which attempts to  
separate the sound into a number of sound streams, each from a  
different sound source. This normally starts off by band pass  
filtering the sound into multiple channels, using a biologically  
inspired filter bank, unlike the Fourier-transform approach taken in  
earlier speech recognition systems. We have followed this approach,  
and extended it by using an (auditory nerve like) spike-based coding  
approach which provides precise timing and can cope with the very wide  
dynamic range of sound signals, and have already used onset features  
detected for sound source direction finding and some basic  
interpretation [1, 2]. Recently, we have extended the types of  
(proto-) feature that can be discovered by using a two dimensional  
spectro-temporal window operator, implemented as a set synapses (whose  
weights and delays encode these window operators) from the spike-coded  
signal to a leaky integrate and fire neuron. This approach appears  
promising, since proto-feature detection can be made signal level  
independent, and proto-features which are invariant under the usual  
variation in listening environments can be chosen. Further, this  
approach can use greedy (parallel) processing, taking advantage of  
modern CPUs and signal processing technologies. The research will  
assess proto-features and combinations of these features which are  
useful in foreground/background sound signal separation, and which are  
useful in sound (including, but not only) speech. The techniques will  
recode the sound as a set of sequences of proto-features (and features  
combined from these proto-features), and these sequences will be  
interpreted, and the mapping from proto-features to features adapted  
(for example, using neural net technologies).
The Department has a lab which can be used for multi-stream sound  
acquisition. It also enables the reverberance of the environment to be  
varied.

Further details: see http://www.cs.stir.ac.uk/~lss/research/proposedproject2008.html

--Leslie Smith

Professor Leslie S. Smith,
Head, Dept of Computing Science and Mathematics,
University of Stirling,
Stirling FK9 4LA, Scotland
l.s.smith@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Tel (44) 1786 467435 Fax (44) 1786 464551
www http://www.cs.stir.ac.uk/~lss/






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