22 Nov 2012

Dan Stowell, from Queen Mary, University of London, will give a seminar on "Tracking multiple intermittent sources in noise: inferring a mixture of Markov renewal processes" on Thursday November 22nd at 3:30pm in room 52.321.

Abstract: Consider the sound of birdsong, or footsteps. They are intermittent sounds, having as much structure in the gaps between events as in the events themselves. And often there's more than one bird, or more than one person - so the sound is a mixture of intermittent sources. Standard tracking techniques (e.g. Markov models, autoregressive models) are a poor fit to such situations. We describe a simple signal model (the Markov renewal process (MRP)) for these intermittent data, and introduce a novel inference technique that can infer the presence of multiple MRPs even in heavy noise. We illustrate the technique via a simulation of auditory streaming phenomena, and an experiment to track a mixture of singing birds.

Dan Stowell website