EPSRC logo
 Home | GoW Home | Back | Programme | Scheme | Topic | Sector | Theme | Region | Organisation     
 
Details of Grant
 
EPSRC Reference: EP/G007144/1
Title: Machine Listening using Sparse Representations
Principal Investigator: Professor M Plumbley
Other Investigators:
Researcher Co-investigator:
Project Partner:
Department: Sch of Electronic Eng & Computer Science
Organisation: Queen Mary, University of London
Scheme: Leadership Fellowships
Starts: 01 August 2008 Ends: 31 July 2013 Value (£): 1,211,261
EPSRC Research Topic Classifications:
Artificial Intelligence Technologies User Interface Technologies
Vision, Hearing and Other Senses - Applications in ICT
EPSRC Industrial Sector Classifications:
No relevance to Underpinning Sectors
Related Grants:
Panel History:
Panel DatePanel NameOutcome
12 Jun 2008 Fellowships 2008 Interviews - Panel D Deferred
26 Jun 2008 Fellowship Allocation Panel Meeting Announced
Summary
My aim for this Fellowship is to undertake a concerted programme of research in machine listening, the automatic analysis and understanding of sounds from the world around us. Through this research, and in collaboration with other international researchers, I aim to establish machine listening as a key enabling technology to improve our ability to interact with the world, leading to advances in many areas such as health, security and the creative industries.

Human listeners have many capabilities a machine listening system should ideally have: to recognize a wide range of sounds; to segregate one sound source from a mixture of many sound sources; to judge complex attributes of sound such as rhythm and timbre (sound quality). Most human listeners take these abilities for granted, yet it has proved extremely difficult for conventional audio signal processing methods to tackle many of these tasks. Even currently "successful"

tasks, such as automatic speech recognition, have typically led to very specialized techniques which cannot easily be applied to other domains. I propose to introduce new methods for machine listening of general audio scenes.

As part of this work, I also will develop new interdisciplinary collaborations with both the machine vision and biological sensory research communities to

investigate and develop general organizational principles for machine listening. One such principle that currently looks very promising is that of sparse representations. New theoretical advances and practical applications mean that sparse representations has recently emerged as a new and powerful analysis method, based on the principle that observations should be represented by only a few items chosen from a large number of possible items. This approach now has great potential for analysis and measurement of audio as well as other sensory signals. I also plan to use sparse representations to explore new biologically-inspired machine listening methods, and in turn to improve our understanding

of biological hearing systems.

Success in this research will open the way for new devices and systems able to process, identify and respond to a wide range of sounds, with diverse applications including: audio searching for the music and video industry; advances in hearing aids and cochlear implants; and incident detection for improved public safety on stations, roads and airports.

Final Report Summary
No final report summary is available for this grant.
Further Information:  
Organisation Website: http://www.qmul.ac.uk
Terms and conditions