Speaker: Israel Cohen, Louis and Samuel Seidan Professor of Electrical Engineering at the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology
Title: Array Processing and Beamforming with Kronecker Products
Abstract: The focus of this talk is on array processing and beamforming with Kronecker products. We consider a large family of sensor arrays that enable the decomposition of the steering vector as a Kronecker product of two steering vectors of smaller virtual arrays. Instead of directly designing a global beamformer for the original array, we break it down following the decomposition of the steering vector, and design smaller virtual beamformers separately optimized for each virtual array. This implies smaller matrices to invert, which increases the robustness of the beamformers, and less observations to estimate the statistics when necessary. We explain how to perform beamforming with Kronecker product filters differently from the well-known and studied conventional approach. We show how to derive fixed, adaptive, and differential beamformers with remarkable flexibility thanks to the Kronecker product formulation. Furthermore, fixed and adaptive beamformers can be combined very intelligently, so that the better of each one of these two approaches is emphasized for performance enhancement. We also address the problem of spatiotemporal signal enhancement, and explain how to perform Kronecker product filtering in this context.
Bio: Israel Cohen (M’01-SM’03-F’15) is the Louis and Samuel Seidan Professor in electrical engineering at the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology, Haifa, Israel. He is also a Visiting Professor at Northwestern Polytechnical University, Xi’an, China. He is an IEEE Fellow “for contributions to the theory and application of speech enhancement”, and Distinguished Lecturer of the IEEE Signal Processing Society (2019-2020). He received the B.Sc. (Summa Cum Laude), M.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering from the Technion- Israel Institute of Technology, Haifa, Israel, in 1990, 1993 and 1998, respectively. From 1990 to 1998, he was a Research Scientist with RAFAEL Research Laboratories, Haifa, Israel Ministry of Defense. From 1998 to 2001, he was a Postdoctoral Research Associate with the Computer Science Department, Yale University, New Haven, CT, USA. In 2001 he joined the Electrical Engineering Department of the Technion. He is a coeditor of the Multichannel Speech Processing Section of the Springer Handbook of Speech Processing (Springer, 2008), and a coauthor of Fundamentals of Signal Enhancement and Array Signal Processing (Wiley-IEEE Press, 2018). He was the recipient of the Norman Seiden Prize for Academic Excellence (2017), the SPS Signal Processing Letters Best Paper Award (2014), the Alexander Goldberg Prize for Excellence in Research (2010), and the Muriel and David Jacknow Award for Excellence in Teaching (2009). He is an Associate Member of the IEEE Audio and Acoustic Signal Processing Technical Committee. He was an Associate Editor, IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON SPEECH AND AUDIO PROCESSING (2004-2007); Associate Editor, IEEE SIGNAL PROCESSING LETTERS (2004-2008); Member, IEEE Audio and Acoustic Signal Processing Technical Committee (2012-2017); Member, IEEE Speech and Language Processing Technical Committee (2013-2015); Guest Editor, European Association for Signal Processing Journal on Advances in Signal Processing Special Issue on Advances in Multimicrophone Speech Processing; and Guest Editor, Elsevier Speech Communication Journal a Special Issue on Speech Enhancement. His research interests are array processing, statistical signal processing, deep learning, analysis and modeling of acoustic signals, speech enhancement, noise estimation, microphone arrays, source localization, blind source separation, system identification and adaptive filtering.
ECpE Seminar Host: Chinmay Hegde