Signal Processing Group Wins VDE ITG Award Again in 2024!

15 August 2024, by Prof. Dr.-Ing. Timo Gerkmann

Photo: sp group

The 2024 award of the Information Technology Society (ITG) within VDE goes again to the Signal Processing group.

This is the honored publication:

Julius Richter, Simon Welker, Jean-Marie Lemercier, Bunlong Lay, Timo Gerkmann, "Speech Enhancement and Dereverberation with Diffusion-based Generative Models", IEEE/ACM Trans. Audio, Speech, Language Proc., Vol. 31, pp. 2351 - 2364, 2023. [doi] [arxiv] [code] [audio]

This work represents one of the first proposals of diffusion-based generative AI models for single-channel speech enhancement. It introduces a stochastic differential equation that allows training the diffusion process on pairs of noisy and clean signals. This concept has subsequently also been used in other fields, such as image processing to restore corrupted images.

The ITG award by the Information Technology Society in the VDE annually honors outstanding scientific publications by its members in the field of information technology. Each award comes with a monetary prize of 3,000 euros and a certificate, which are presented during a festive ceremony held annually in autumn.

The Signal Processing group had already received this prestigious award in 2022 for the work
Kristina Tesch, Timo Gerkmann, "Nonlinear Spatial Filtering in Multichannel Speech Enhancement", IEEE/ACM Trans. Audio, Speech, Language Proc., Vol. 29, pp. 1795-1805, 2021.