Imagine a group of fans cheering their team at the Olympics from a local pub, who want to feel transposed to the arena by experiencing a faithful and convincing auditory perspective of the scene they see on the screen. They hear the punch of the player kicking the ball and are immersed in the atmosphere as if they are watching from the sideline. Alternatively, imagine a small group of classical music aficionados following a broadcast from the Royal Opera at home, who want to have the experience of listening to it from best seats at the opera house. Imagine finally having a surround sound system with room simulators that actually sound like the spaces they are supposed to emulate, or watching a 3D nature film in a home theatre where the sound closely follows the movements one sees on the screen. Imagine also a video game capable of providing a convincing dynamic auditory perspective that tracks a moving game player and responds to his actions, with virtual objects moving and acoustic environments changing. Finally, place all this in the context of visual technology that is moving firmly in the direction of "3D" capture and rendering, where enhanced spatial accuracy and detail are key features. In this talk we will present a technology that enables all these spatial sound applications using low-count multichannel systems.

Biography

Zoran Cvetkovic received his Dipl. Ing. and Mag. degrees from the University of Belgrade, Yugoslavia, in 1989 and 1992, respectively; the M. Phil. from Columbia University in 1993; and the Ph.D. in electrical engineering from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1995. He held research positions at EPFL, Lausanne, Switzerland (1996), and at Harvard University (2002-04). Between 1997 and 2002 he was a member of the technical staff of AT&T Shannon Laboratory. He is now Professor of Signal Processing at King's College London. His research interests are in the broad area of signal processing, ranging from theoretical aspects of signal analysis to applications in audio and speech technology, and biomedical engineering. From 2005 to 2008 he served as an Associate Editor of IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing.