PhD Studentship: Cutting-edge microphone arrays for improving smart device performance in adverse environments
University of Southampton
State University, Browse similar opportunities
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State University, Browse similar opportunities
PhD Supervisor: Jiahong Zhao
Project description
This project aims to explore the design of an alternative class of microphone arrays, so-called co-prime microphone arrays, for recording and processing speech in adverse environments. This will address a key challenge to improve the performance of modern smart devices in noisy and reverberant environments.
Smart devices have been rapidly advancing over the past few decades, including robots, autonomous vehicles and smart home assistants (e.g. Amazon Echo, Google Home, Microsoft Kinect), which leads to a revolution in our daily lives. A clear recording of speech is highly crucial for human-machine interaction, without which the performance of all smart devices is limited.
In the real world, there is always noise, reverberation and other interfering sounds, and the recording and processing of the target speech is highly challenging. Therefore, a high-quality, high-efficiency and low-cost speech recording and processing method with robustness to adverse environments is urgently needed.
Existing recording approaches use an array of uniformly spaced microphones that are used to obtain a desired output with emphasis on the sound from the target direction and suppression of the sound from all other directions. Jointly processing the multiple microphone recordings to form a single output is termed beamforming and can bring much clearer recordings compared to a single microphone with the presence of noise, reverberation and simultaneous interfering sounds. However, the speech is time-variant and the frequency range of such signals is broad. Thus, the performance of speech recording and processing offered by traditional uniform microphone arrays is not sufficient.
This project aims to investigate co-prime microphone arrays, which have shown great potential in the recording and processing of speech in adverse environments. It is of high value to further develop the geometry, beamforming and speech direction of arrival estimation algorithms using co-prime microphone arrays, which are highly practical for real-world smart products and will boost their development and application.
The project will focus on:
Entry Requirements
A very good undergraduate degree (at least a UK 2:1 honours degree, or its international equivalent).
Closing date : 31 August 2024. Applications will be considered in the order that they are received, the position will be considered filled when a suitable candidate has been identified.
Funding: Funding for tuition fees and a living stipend are available on a competitive basis. Funding will be awarded on a rolling basis, so apply early for the best opportunity to be considered.
How To Apply
Apply online, above: Select programme type (Research), 2024/25, Faculty of Engineering and Physical Sciences, next page select “PhD Engineering & Environment (Full time)”. In Section 2 of the application form you should insert the name of the supervisor Jiahong Zhao
Applications should include:
Curriculum Vitae
Two reference letters
Degree Transcripts/Certificates to date
please contact: [email protected]
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