Current Press Releases

From September 9th to 13th, IDMT presents an integrated platform for cross-media analysis, querying and recommendation as well as its A/V-Toolbox in Amsterdam.

Joint project ACME 4.0 launched. How can acoustic sensors be used to make industrial installations more intelligent, safer and more efficient?

The measuring instrument manufacturer RTW and scientists from the Fraunhofer IDMT are developing a new analysis tool for sound engineers as part of the »SI4B« research project.

At this year’s NAB Show, the world’s largest convention for the digital media industry, taking place April 18 – 21 in Las Vegas, Fraunhofer IDMT for the first time will be presenting its “Audio Forensics Toolbox”. The software package allows users to detect traces of previous editing and encoding steps in audio material, in order to assess the quality of recordings and optimize workflows in production processes.

Tomorrow the international trade fair of technologies and services for entertainment, integrated systems and creation will start in Frankfurt am Main. Fraunhofer IDMT will be presenting »RSM Pro«, the new object based room simulation feature, which now has been integrated into »SpatialSound Wave«, Fraunhofer’s system for producing and replaying true-to-life 3D sound. Using RSM Pro, room parameters and sound reflections can be set individually to make things sound really natural.

On March 23, 2016, Zoo Leipzig will be presenting its new interactive great ape watching station to the public. Part of the station will be the intelligent face recognition software developed by Fraunhofer, which will be used for automatic identification of individual chimpanzees living in Pongoland (what the ape enclosure at Zoo Leipzig is called). Visitors at Zoo Leipzig may use the system to request information about each individual animal in the compound.

Aachen/Oldenburg. At this year’s Annual Conference on Acoustics (DAGA) in Aachen, the German Acoustical Society (DEGA) today gave the Lothar Cremer Award for outstanding achievements by young scientists to Dr. rer. nat. Jan Rennies-Hochmuth. With the award, the society thus recognises his research work on auditory perception and particularly on speech intelligibility in environments with reverberation, echo and interference noise.

There is a special piano teacher, always available and always listening closely to what the students are playing. His name is Skoove, and he has been around since November 2015. Skoove is a browser-based learning platform that offers interactive lessons for students who want to learn to play the piano, electric piano, or keyboard. What makes Skoove so special is that students receive immediate feedback on their performance as they play. This is made possible by the melody recognition algorithm developed by Fraunhofer IDMT.

Oldenburg/Berlin. Working in call and service centres demands a high level of concentration. Employees have to access information from different databases during communication with the customer. Listening to other people talk for hours on the telephone also demands mental effort – particularly if a large number of employees are talking on the phone at the same time in an open-plan office and the background noise level is correspondingly high. Scientists at the Fraunhofer IDMT will present a software application at this year’s Call Center World in Berlin from 23 to 25 February which allows service staff to adapt the telephone signal output to their individual hearing needs. Studies show that the technology permits a significant improvement in speech intelligibility particularly in conditions with ambient noise or poor signal quality.

Oldenburg. Loudspeaker announcements at railway stations are often incomprehensible, since the surroundings are noisy. With new software, the clarity of such announcements can be considerably improved. A microphone picks up ambient noise and adjusts the spoken messages perfectly to the noise level. Even calls over mobile phones will be understood more easily with the help of this technology.