Walter Kellermann (University of Erlangen-Nuremberg)

Walter Kellermann is a professor for communications at the Chair of Multimedia Communications and Signal Processing of the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, Germany. He received the Dipl.-Ing. (univ.) degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg in 1983, and the Dr.-Ing. degree ('with distinction') from the Technical University Darmstadt, Germany, in 1988. From 1989 to 1990, he was a  Postdoctoral Member of Technical Staff at AT&T Bell Laboratories, Murray Hill, NJ. In 1990, he joined Philips Kommunikations Industrie, Nuremberg, Germany. From 1993 to 1999 he was a professor at the Fachhochschule Regensburg before he joined the University Erlangen-Nuremberg as a professor and head of the audio research laboratory in 1999. In 1999 he co-founded the consulting firm DSP Solutions.

Dr. Kellermann authored or co-authored 16 book chapters and more than 170 refereed papers in journals and conference proceedings. He served as an associate editor and as guest editor to various journals, e.g., to the IEEE Transactions on Speech and Audio Processing from 2000 to 2004, and to the EURASIP Journal on Signal Processing. Presently he serves as associate editor to the EURASIP Journal on Advances in Signal Processing and as a Member of the Overview Editorial Board for the IEEE Signal Processing Society. He was the general chair of the 5th International Workshop on Microphone Arrays in 2003 and the IEEE Workshop on Applications of Signal Processing to Audio and Acoustics in 2005. He was the general co-chair of the 2nd International Workshop on Hands-free Speech Communication and Microphone Arrays (HSCMA) in 2008 and is a general co-chair for HSCMA 2011. He was a Distinguished Lecturer of the IEEE Signal Processing Society for 2007 and 2008. He was the Chair of the Technical Committee for Audio and Acoustic Signal Processing of the IEEE Signal Processing  Society 2008 to 2010. He is an IEEE Fellow.

Acoustic Signal Processing for Natural Interactive and Immersive Human/Machine Interfaces

Since the very beginning of audio signal reproduction, immersion was always seen as a crucial feature of high quality. With the arrival of teleconferencing systems, immersive multichannel reproduction  became part of telecommunication systems, and the according terminals developed into multi-functional human/machine interfaces, supporting not just telecommunication but also gaming, simulators, control consoles interactive home theatres and many other purposes. Along with increasingly powerful and cost-effective signal processing hardware, the according acoustic signal processing algorithms developed dramatically over the last decade striving for perfect solutions for the fundamental problems of acoustic interfaces: Acoustic feedback from loudspeakers to microphones, noise and interfering sources, and reverberation in enclosures.

In this talk, we will shortly review the fundamental problems and then highlight some recent   developments in acoustic echo control for massive multichannel reproduction, signal extraction, source localization, dereverberation, as well as distant-talking speech recognition. Finally, we also will speculate on promising avenues for future research.