Teaching

Lectures

Currently the DSS group offers eight lectures (five internal and three external ones). Most of them are presented during the normal term times, one external lecture is offered as block course in the summer break.

	Summer term	Winter term	Bachelor	Master	Remarks
Adaptive Filters (Gerhard Schmidt)
Advanced Digital Signal Processing (Gerhard Schmidt)
Design Space Exploration for Unmanned Systems (Frank Ehlers)
Digital Audio Effects (Klaus Linhard)					Block course
Fundamentals of Acoustics (Jan Abshagen)
Pattern Recognition and Machine Learning (Gerhard Schmidt)
Signals and Systems I (Gerhard Schmidt)
Signals and Systems II (Gerhard Schmidt)

Labs

Currently the DSS group offers two bachelor and three master labs. If you are interested please have a look on the corresponding section on our website.

	Summer term	Winter term	Bachelor	Master	Remarks
System Theory Lab (DSS)
Embedded Signal Processing Lab (DSS)
Advanced Topics Lab (ICT/LNS/DSS)					Organized by the ICT group.
Communications Lab (LNS/ICT/DSS)					Organized by the LNS group.
Machine Learning Lab (DSS)
Real-time Signal Processing Lab (DSS/ICT/LNS)

Seminars

Until now we offer three seminars. All of them are about selected topics in digital signal processing and maschine learning. Further details can be found here.

	Summer term	Winter term	Bachelor	Master	Remarks
Selected Topics in Speech and Audio Signal Processing (Gerhard Schmidt)
Selected Topics in Machine Learning (Gerhard Schmidt)
Selected Topics in Medical Signal Processing (Gerhard Schmidt)
Selected Topics in Underwater Signal Processing (Gerhard Schmidt)

Projects

We try to offer always multi-student projects in order to teach also team work. Most of the time our projects are offered within the lecture "Signals and Systems". For information on previous projects please have a look on this section of our website.

Theses

If you want to do your bachelor or master thesis with us, please have a look on the corresponding section on our website or come over to the office of Prof. Schmidt and talk with him about possible topics that might fit to your personal needs.

We are delighted to announce that Marten Finck has been awarded the GaS prize for his Master's thesis on "Evaluation of Speech Quality Using Machine Learning".

In his work, he investigated possible side effects of magnetic resonance-guided focussed ultrasound treatment (MRgFUS) on speech quality in patients with neurological diseases such as Parkinson's disease and essential tremor. This innovative and non-invasive treatment method is used to reduce tremor, i.e. the shaking of limbs.

To evaluate the effects on speech, pre- and post-operative speech recordings of 56 patients were analysed: Speech quality was assessed in five categories (monotony, clarity, fluency, auditory effort and vocal tremor) through a survey with 21 participants and used to create a convolutional neural network (CNN). This generates an objective assessment of speech quality using mel frequency cepstral coefficients (MFCCs), fundamental frequency and loudness. A mean absolute error (MAE) of 0.81 on a scale of 0 to 10 was achieved, compared to a standard deviation of 0.67 for the survey participants compared to a reference assessment. The evaluation of the survey revealed minor positive and negative changes in speech quality, which were balanced overall and tended to indicate natural speech variations in connection with the patients' underlying illnesses.