Dr Christine Evers, a Research Associate in Speech and Audio Processing has been awarded a fellowship from the EPSRC.

Dr Christine Evers has been a Research Associate in the Communications and Signal Processing group since 2014. Her fellowship from the Engineering and Physical Sciences research Council (EPSRC) is titled Acoustic Signal Processing and Scene Analysis for Socially Assistive Robots.

The aim of this research is to provide robots and machines with the ability to understand and adapt to the surrounding acoustic environment. Acoustic scene analysis combines salient features from the observed audio signals in order to create situational awareness of the environment. Many of the tasks required for analysis of the acoustic scene are jointly dependent. For example, localising the sources of sounds buried in noise and reverberation is a challenging problem. Sound source localisation can be improved by enhancing the signals of desired sources, such as human speakers, whilst suppressing interfering sources, such as a television.

However, for source enhancement, desired and interfering sources must be spatially distinguished, hence requiring knowledge of the source directions. The novel objective of this research is therefore to identify and exploit constructively the joint dependencies between the tasks required for acoustic scene analysis. To achieve this objective, the project will take advantage of the motion of microphone arrays installed in the head and arms of moving humanoid robots in order to explore uncertain events from different perspectives. Furthermore, approaches will be investigated that allow multiple robots to share their experience and knowledge about the acoustic environment within a distributed sensor network.

The research will be conducted at Imperial College London, within the Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering with academic advice from national, European, and international project partners at the University of Edinburgh; International Audio Laboratories Erlangen, Germany; and Bar-Ilan University, Israel.

Congratulations to Christine on receiving this fellowship.