Immersive Speech and Audio Communication

Call for Papers

In recent years, a clear trend towards the needs for truly immersive communication has emerged. As businesses, families, and friends are spread geographically; there is a genuine desire to remain connected, and to make mediated communication as transparent as possible, with the focus shifting from sharing information to sharing experiences.

Other applications for immersive communication include telemedicine, e-learning, and entertainment. Increasing computing power and network bandwidth have resulted in major advances towards realizing realistic immersion. While multiple sensory aspects need to be combined to deliver a realistic sense of immersion, sound remains a vital aspect of communication. This special issue focuses on immersive speech and audio communication systems. Papers summarizing recent research work in the areas of immersive audio capture, coding and transmission for immersive communication, and immersive rendering are invited for this special issue. Potential topics include, but are not limited to:

• Capture: hands-free speech acquisition for immersive communication, auditory scene analysis, sound source localization, dereverberation, beamforming, blind source separation, noise reduction, (multichannel) acoustic echo cancellation, and distributed speech capture
• Coding and transmission: immersive speech and audio coding, scalable speech and audio coding, multichannel speech and audio coding, unified speech and audio coding, and real-time aspects in coding
• Rendering: spatial sound reproduction through loudspeakers and/or headphones and spatialization, directional sound reproduction, psychoacoustics for immersive speech communication, text-to-speech synthesis for immersive communications, such as audio-visual speech synthesis, expressive synthetic speech, etc
• Application-specific technologies: conferencing, telepresence, and gaming

Before submission authors should carefully read over the journal's Author Guidelines, which are located at http://www.hindawi.com/journals/jece/guidelines/. Prospective authors should submit an electronic copy of their complete manuscript through the journal Manuscript Tracking System at http://mts.hindawi.com/ according to the following timetable:

Lead Guest Editor

• Sriram Srinivasan, Philips Research Laboratories, Eindhoven, The Netherlands

Guest Editors

• Moo Young Kim, Department of Information and Communication Engineering, Sejong University, Seoul, Korea
• Athanasios Mouchtaris, Department of Computer Science, University of Crete, and Foundation for Research and Technology-Hellas (FORTH), Greece