Intelligent Acoustic Interfaces with Multisensor Acquisition for Immersive Reproduction

Immersive speech communication systems have been gaining increasing attention due to their ability to reproduce enhanced acoustic images, and thus achieving good performance in terms of sound quality and accuracy. In this context, a fundamental role is played by intelligent acoustic interfaces (IAIs), which aim at acquiring and/or reproducing desired acoustic information with enhanced perception. The recent widespread availability of multimedia devices, equipped with different kind of sensors, has broadened the range of data processing methods, thus giving a chance for developing advanced IAIs. In this paper, we propose an immersive communication system composed of two IAIs: the first one exploits microphones and cameras, together with a signal processing system, to reduce unwanted noise and enhance the speech quality of the desired information in the transmitting room; the second one is an advanced reproduction system based on a loudspeaker array and on an effective wave field synthesis technique capable of reproducing the spatial perception of the desired speech source in the receiving room. The whole system has been assessed in simulated and real immersive communication scenarios: objective and subjective evaluations have been shown the effectiveness of the proposed system.