Benoı̂t Champagne

Siamak Yousefi, Xiao-Wen Chang, Benoit Champagne

In this work, a system scheme is proposed for tracking a radio emitting target moving in two-dimensional space. The localization is based on the use of biased time-of-arrival (TOA) measurements obtained at two asynchronous receivers, each equipped with two closely spaced antennas. By exploiting the multi-antenna configuration and using all the TOA measurements up to current time step, the relative clock bias at each receiver and the target position are jointly estimated by solving a nonlinear least-squares (NLS) problem. To this end, a novel time recursive algorithm is proposed which fully takes advantage of the problem structure to achieve computational efficiency while using orthogonal transformations to ensure numerical reliability. Simulations show that the mean-squared error (MSE) of the proposed method is much smaller than that of existing methods with the same antenna scheme, and approaches the Cramer-Rao lower bound (CRLB) closely.

Hanwook Chung, Vikrant Singh Tomar, Benoit Champagne

In this paper, we introduce a spectral-domain inverse filtering approach for single-channel speech de-reverberation using deep convolutional neural network (CNN). The main goal is to better handle realistic reverberant conditions where the room impulse response (RIR) filter is longer than the short-time Fourier transform (STFT) analysis window. To this end, we consider the convolutive transfer function (CTF) model for the reverberant speech signal. In the proposed framework, the CNN architecture is trained to directly estimate the inverse filter of the CTF model. Among various choices for the CNN structure, we consider the U-net which consists of a fully-convolutional auto-encoder network with skip-connections. Experimental results show that the proposed method provides better de-reverberation performance than the prevalent benchmark algorithms under various reverberation conditions.

Farnood Faraji, Yazid Attabi, Benoit Champagne et al.

The advent of learning-based methods in speech enhancement has revived the need for robust and reliable training features that can compactly represent speech signals while preserving their vital information. Time-frequency domain features, such as the Short-Term Fourier Transform (STFT) and Mel-Frequency Cepstral Coefficients (MFCC), are preferred in many approaches. While the MFCC provide for a compact representation, they ignore the dynamics and distribution of energy in each mel-scale subband. In this work, a speech enhancement system based on Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) is implemented and tested with a combination of Audio FingerPrinting (AFP) features obtained from the MFCC and the Normalized Spectral Subband Centroids (NSSC). The NSSC capture the locations of speech formants and complement the MFCC in a crucial way. In experiments with diverse speakers and noise types, GAN-based speech enhancement with the proposed AFP feature combination achieves the best objective performance while reducing memory requirements and training time.

Saeed Vahidian, Sajad Hatamnia, Benoit Champagne

Physical layer security offers an efficient means to decrease the risk of confidential information leakage through wiretap links. In this paper, we address the physical-layer security in a cooperative wireless subnetwork that includes a source-destination pair and multiple relays, exchanging information in the presence of a malevolent eavesdropper. Specifically, the eavesdropper is active in the network and transmits artificial noise (AN) with a multiple-antenna transmitter to confound both the relays and the destination. We first analyse the secrecy capacity of the direct source-to-destination transmission in terms of intercept probability (IP) and secrecy outage probability (SOP). A decode-and-forward incremental relaying (IR) protocol is then introduced to improve reliability and security of communications in the presence of the active eavesdropper. Within this context, and depending on the availability of channel state information, three different schemes (one optimal and two sub-optimal) are proposed to select a trusted relay to improve the achievable secrecy rate. For each one of these schemes, and for both selection and maximum ratio combining at the destination and eavesdropper, we derive new and exact closed-form expressions for the IP and SOP. Our analysis and simulation results demonstrate the superior performance of the proposed IR-based selection schemes for secure communication. They also confirm the existence of a floor phenomenon for the SOP in the absence of AN.