Speaker: Professor Wenwu Wang, University of Surrey
Abstract: In complex room settings, machine listening systems may experience a degradation in performance due to factors like room reverberations, background noise, and unwanted sounds. Concurrently, machine vision systems can suffer from issues like visual occlusions, insufficient lighting, and background clutter. Combining audio and visual data has the potential to overcome these limitations and enhance machine perception in complex audio-visual environments. In this talk, we will first discuss the machine cocktail party problem, and the development of speech source separation algorithms for extracting individual speech sources from sound mixtures. We will then discuss selected works related to audio-visual speech separation. This encompasses the fusion of audio-visual data for speech source separation, employing techniques such as Gaussian mixture models, dictionary learning, and deep learning.
Bio: Wenwu Wang is a Professor in Signal Processing and Machine Learning, University of Surrey, UK. He is also an AI Fellow at the Surrey Institute for People Centred Artificial Intelligence. His current research interests include signal processing, machine learning and perception, artificial intelligence, machine audition (listening), and statistical anomaly detection. He has (co)-authored over 300 papers in these areas. He has been recognized as a (co-)author or (co)-recipient of more than 15 awards, including the 2022 IEEE Signal Processing Society Young Author Best Paper Award, ICAUS 2021 Best Paper Award, DCASE 2020 and 2023 Judge’s Award, DCASE 2019 and 2020 Reproducible System Award, and LVA/ICA 2018 Best Student Paper Award. He is an Associate Editor (2020-2025) for IEEE/ACM Transactions on Audio Speech and Language Processing. He was a Senior Area Editor (2019-2023) and Associate Editor (2014-2018) for IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing. He is the elected Chair (2023-2024) of IEEE Signal Processing Society (SPS) Machine Learning for Signal Processing Technical Committee, a Board Member (2023-2024) of IEEE SPS Technical Directions Board, the Chair (2025-2027) and Vice Chair (2022-2024) of the EURASIP Technical Area Committee on Acoustic Speech and Music Signal Processing, an elected Member (2021-2026) of the IEEE SPS Signal Processing Theory and Methods Technical Committee. He was a Satellite Workshop Co-Chair for INTERSPEECH 2022, a Publication Co-Chair for IEEE ICASSP 2019, Local Arrangement Co-Chair of IEEE MLSP 2013, and Publicity Co-Chair of IEEE SSP 2009. He is a Satellite Workshop Co-Chair for IEEE ICASSP 2024, Special Session Co-Chair of IEEE MLSP 2024, and Technical Program Co-Chair of IEEE MLSP 2025.
