Current Press Releases

Attending the South by Southwest® Conference and Festivals in Austin, Texas from March 11-14, the Fraunhofer experts from Ilmenau (Germany) will be joined by representatives from MediaApes and Aspekteins, two German creative agencies in the vanguard of 360° immersive VR and AR worlds. The collaboration is part of the German delegation attending this year’s SXSW®, comprising about 1,000 creative people from both start-up companies and renowned enterprises.

Under the banner »Comfort in Understanding«, the Project Group Hearing, Speech and Audio Technology of the Fraunhofer IDMT in Oldenburg will be presenting solutions for better speech intelligibility and a speech-to-text application for telephone systems at Call Center World 2018.

At LEARNTEC 2018, the leading trade fair for digital learning taking place January 30 to February 1 in Karlsruhe, Fraunhofer IDMT will be presenting a new version of askMe!, comprising new functions as well as extensions of existing functions.

From January 15 to 21, the researchers of Fraunhofer IDMT will be demonstrating the unique space-saving design and great sound quality of its planar loudspeakers, together with a solution for producing directional sound, at imm cologne (Hall 4.2, Booth E42).

The Fraunhofer IDMT in Oldenburg has developed the audio technology for Deutsche Telekom’s smart speaker. At the core is the optimized interaction of speakers and microphones for voice control even under difficult ambient conditions. Besides that, the IDMT has achieved outstanding acoustics for telephony and music playback in a small enclosure. The intelligent personal assistant aims to make everyday life easier through voice control and connected services.

The Fraunhofer Institute for Digital Media Technology IDMT in Oldenburg has compared the speech intelligibility and sound quality of a Samsung smart TV and a Samsung soundbar. The results show that using the soundbar considerably reduces listening effort in comparison to using only the TV set.

At this year’s International Broadcasting Convention IBC taking place September 15–19, in Amsterdam, Fraunhofer IDMT will be presenting a further updated set of its A/V analysis and media management tools. Complementing previous presentations on automatic metadata extraction and quality control, this year’s presentations include new and unique tools to automatically detect relationships and the processing history within A/V content sets, as well as an Open-Source framework for multi-modal analysis and recommendation.

TOA (Tech Open Air) is a combination of a conference and a festival that cannot be found in a similar form elsewhere across Europe. From July 11th to 14th, round about 20,000 people from the international technology and startup scene will meet in Berlin to connect, grow and inspire the human spirit through interdisciplinary knowledge exchange and collaboration. Fraunhofer IDMT will contribute to this year’s TOA by offering its expertise in two events: the Music Hackday and the Music Tech Lab.

At Control 2017, the international trade fair for quality assurance taking place May 9th – 12th in Stuttgart, the Fraunhofer Vision Alliance will be presenting various solutions for industrial process monitoring. Among the technologies presented will be a method developed by Fraunhofer IDMT, allowing acoustic process and condition monitoring, event detection, and end-of-line testing. How acoustic signals can reliably be captured and intelligently processed will be demonstrated at the Fraunhofer booth #6302 in hall 6.

At this year’s NAB Show, the world’s largest convention for the digital media industry, taking place April 22–27, in Las Vegas, Fraunhofer IDMT will be presenting new technologies for A/V analysis and search. The updated tools allow users to detect partial duplicates, track metadata and content reuse, automatically extract metadata and manage complex multimodal analysis workflows.

At Hannover Messe Fraunhofer IDMT will be presenting a solution for voice based machine control, acoustic monitoring of processes, and acoustic identification of materials.

At Hannover Messe, taking place April 24 – 28, Fraunhofer IDMT will be presenting the findings from a research project on making the sounds of electrically powered machines, devices, or components audible during virtual product development already. New developments allow the use of 3D models to analyze, assess and improve the acoustic properties of products, instead of building costly real prototypes.

In industrial production, the testing of machines and products by means of acoustic signals still takes a niche role. At the Hannover Messe 2017, Fraunhofer is exhibiting a cognitive system that detects erroneous sounds more objectively than the human ear (Hall 2, Booth C16/C22). The technology has successfully passed the initial practical tests and there detected up to 99 percent of the errors.

At Prolight + Sound, taking place April 4–7, Fraunhofer IDMT will be presenting a new version of SpatialSound Wave (SSW), Fraunhofer’s system for easy and efficient object-based production and playback of 3D sound. Alongside with SSW, the experts from Ilmenau will be demonstrating their new planar speaker which can be integrated as an unobtrusive, practically invisible element into any environment.

At this year’s CeBIT, Fraunhofer IDMT will be presenting askMe!, an adaptive E-Assessment tool uniting the benefits of digital educational media to be successful in exams – flexibility, personalization, and interactivity.

At this year’s CeBIT, taking place March 20 – 24 in Hanover, Fraunhofer IDMT will be presenting a novel method for automatic quality assessment in production processes.

At Call Center World (CCW), taking place February 21 – 23 in Berlin, Fraunhofer IDMT will be presenting state-of-the-art software solutions for improved speech intelligibility and automatic speech-to-text conversion.

”The changing face of digital learning culture“ is the motto of the 25th LEARNTEC, taking place January 24 – 26 in Karlsruhe. In line with this motto, Fraunhofer IDMT will be presenting a solution for qualified e-assessment of professional skills in (continuing) education settings. askMe! is a platform that offers a sophisticated test environment, motivating learners through integration of multimedia and interactive content to deal with the learning material in an active and explorative manner.

From November 17th to 20th, acoustic experts of Fraunhofer IDMT together with SAE Institute Köln and Sound & More Media Production will be presenting the results of their second collaborative R&D project in Cologne. Subject: How to turn a car into a rolling concert hall!

Aalborg, Oldenburg. At this year´s »AES International Conference on Headphone Technology« in Aalborg, Denmark, Dr. Jan Rennies-Hochmuth, Hannah Baumgartner, Dirk Oetting and Jens-E. Appell have been awarded with the Technical Paper Award for his work on user-interface concepts for sound personalization in headphones.

At the »Shipbuilding, Machinery & Marine Technology« (SMM) trade fair in Hamburg from 6 to 9 September 2016, the Fraunhofer IDMT will present a computer-assisted dialogue system that allows seafarers to train the standardised communication phrases for international maritime traffic

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.