Speaker: Issa Panahi

Affiliation: University of Texas at Dallas

Seminar Title: Adaptive Signal Processing Methods for Acoustic Noise Cancellation and Speech Enhancement; Applications to MRI Room and Hearing Aid System

Abstract:

Rapid advancement of digital technology and powerful signal processing techniques inspire the development of more intelligent, efficient, and cost-effective systems for many biomedical, bioengineering, commercial, and military applications. Within the many fast expanding signal processing areas, audio/acoustics/speech signal processing has flourished more than ever with the advent of capable and efficient analog and digital technologies; sensors, microphones, loudspeakers, wireless and digital systems such as smartphones, tablets, and laptops. Among many applications of acoustic signal processing are the classification and suppression of noise, sound control, and enhancement of speech (and music) with improved quality and intelligibility.

In this presentation, some architectures and adaptive signal processing algorithms for active noise control (ANC) and speech enhancement (SE) systems developed in our labs are reviewed. The methods include those for reducing acoustic noise and enhancing speech for magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) rooms and for improving performance of hearing aid devices (HADs). Remote control of signals is also pointed out. More specifically, we discuss; the cost-effective adaptive “feedback” ANC methods that are suitable for environments with distributed noise, the impact of noise characteristics and noise decomposition on the performance of single and parallel realization of feedforward and feedback ANC systems, and the possibility of using directional ultrasonic loudspeakers for controlling the noise signal remotely. We also give an overview of using new signal processing based algorithms for enhancing the quality and intelligibility of speech signals. The real-time noise classification and SE algorithms implemented on smartphone for improving the signal processing pipeline of hearing aid devices are presented. Performances of the developed methods are also demonstrated.

Bio:

Issa M.S. Panahi received Ph.D degrees in electrical engineering from the University of Colorado at Boulder, Boulder, Colorado. Dr. Panahi worked in industry and research centers for 18 years before joining the University of Texas at Dallas (UTD) in 2001. He was a senior design engineer for a vision- controlled industrial robot, tape and disk drive systems at the Storage Technology Corp in Colorado, a Research Scientist at the Bellaire Research Center of Shell Oil Development Company in Houston, Texas. He joined the digital signal processing (DSP) division of Texas Instruments Inc (TI) in Houston where he founded and directed the worldwide DSP Embedded Systems business unit and served as a chief DSP architecture, chief technology officer (CTO), advance systems development manager, worldwide application manager, and TI’s senior member of technical staff, for the business unit until 2000. Dr. Panahi was Wireless/OMAP application manager at TI in Dallas from 2000 to 2001. During his tenure at TI, Dr. Panahi directed a dedicated TI’s Corporate R&D team, managed multiple funded university research projects in US and abroad, and was a member of industrial advisory board in several universities including Rice, TA&M, and OSU.
Dr. Panahi is currently an associate professor of electrical engineering and also a research associate professor in the department of Bioengineering at UTD. He is founding director of the Statistical Signal Processing and Acoustic Research laboratories in the Erik Jonsson school of Engineering and Computer Science at UTD. His research areas include audio/acoustic/speech signal processing for biomedical and commercial applications with emphasis on statistical and adaptive signal processing; active noise control, speech enhancement, psychoacoustics, signal detection & estimation, source separation, remote sensing, microphone/ loudspeaker arrays and beamforming.
Dr. Panahi was founder and vice-chair of the IEEE-Dallas Chapter of Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society (EMBS) for 6 years. He has been vice-chair and chair of the IEEE-Dallas Chapter of Signal Processing Society since 2004. He received the 2005 and 2011 “Outstanding Service Award” from the IEEE-Section. He has been associate editor, co-organizer, and session chairs of the annual international conferences of IEEE EMBS (EMBC). He was a member of organizing committee and chair of plenary sessions of the IEEE ICASSP2010. He organized tutorial workshops and chaired several invited sessions at international conferences such as APE, American Control Conference (ACC), International Federation of Automatic Control-World Congress (IFAC), and IEEE International Conference on Fuzzy Systems. Dr. Panahi holds a US patent, and has authored/co-authored 5 books and over 190 technical articles, journals, and conference papers. His journal paper was recognized as the best paper of 2013 by the Electronics and Telecommunication Research Institute (ETRI) of S. Korea. He is a senior member of IEEE; Signal Processing Society, Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society (EMBS), and Acoustic Society of America (ASA).