Multimedia Systems Education Innovations I: Speech

Abstract

Multimedia Systems is becoming very important in undergraduate education. The word multimedia refers to speech, audio and video data. Speech, audio and video and general digital signal processing (DSP) devices are very common-place in everyday life. This is due to the growth of popularity of personal digital assistants (PDA), cellular phones, and other embedded speech/audio/video devices. One of the major applications of DSP processors is in speech, audio and video processing.We are developing a 3-part course sequence that will help teach undergraduates multimedia systems. The first part of the 3-part course sequence is about speech. The second and third parts will focus on audio and video. The goal is to demystify these applications of real-time multimedia signal processing so that undergraduates can have a mastery of the basic techniques.In this paper, we provide details of a course we designed for undergraduates which focuses on understanding how to process speech. We provide examples of the curriculum, what is covered and how we cover it. We also provide examples of laboratory projects that are used to complement the class lecture sessions. We use MATLAB software in all the lab projects.We also discuss possible implementations of the speech coding and processing using hardware such as DSPs. In the future, we plan to introduce the use of FPGAs for this application as well.Details of the course and our experiences in developing and offering them will be presented at the conference.