Advances and challenges in speech, audio and acoustics processing for multimedia communications

Summary form only given, as follows. Telecommunication is experiencing a revolution in progress. The advent of the Internet and its exponentially rapid growth has triggered an entirely new thinking in terms of the means to achieve communication. The old paradigm of telephony has been shifted or broadened to video conferencing, distance learning, and remote collaboration and access to multimedia databases, offering both flexibility and richness in media content, handling and management. While significant contributions to this bright new-world of telecommunication come from infrastructure technologies such as switches, routers and optical networks, equally important, if not more so, is the advance in various signal processing areas which form the drivers of the new paradigm. These include high quality acoustics, audio processing and distribution, speech recognition, biometric authentication and signal synthesis. Systems that integrate these technologies will further bring us mobility, convenience and functionality that will drive the need of communication bandwidth and quality in the future. I summarise advances made in these signal processing technical areas and highlight challenges ahead of us that need to be overcome to realise the ultimate dream of a multimedia era