Prof. Reinhold Haeb-Umbach

Prof. Reinhold Haeb-Umbach: https://www.uni-paderborn.de/en/person/242

Reinhold Haeb-Umbach is Professor of Communications Engineering at Paderborn University, Germany. He has more than 30 years of experience in speech research, which he acquired both in an industrial and academic environment. From 2015 - 2020 he was member of the IEEE Speech and Language Technical Committee, and since 2022 he is member of the IEEE Audio and Acoustics Signal Processing Technical Committee. He is a fellow of the International Speech Communication Association (ISCA) and of the IEEE. His main research interests are in the fields of statistical signal processing and machine learning, with applications to speech enhancement, automatic speech recognition and unsupervised learning from speech and audio.

Tilte: “Automatic Meeting Transcription with Distant Microphones”

Abstract: Automatic meeting transcription is concerned with scripting conversations, enriched with information about who spoke when. This task is particularly challenging, if the speech is captured by microphones from a distance rather than by close-talking microphones, because the recorded signal is noisy and reverberated and can contain a high degree of overlapped speech, where more than one speaker is active at a time. Also, the interaction dynamics, where speakers articulate themselves in an intermittent manner, pose problems to conventional enhancement and recognition systems.

Meeting transcription thus calls for solving several tasks: source separation, diarization, and speech recognition. We will discuss approaches that address those tasks either separately or jointly. We will also elaborate on the particular challenges of "ad-hoc" configurations, where several, initially unsynchronized, microphones at unknown positions are used for signal capture.