Patents by Inventor John Walter McDonough, Jr.

John Walter McDonough, Jr. has filed for patents to protect the following inventions. This listing includes patent applications that are pending as well as patents that have already been granted by the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO).

  • Determining speaker direction using a spherical microphone array
    Patent number: 9560441
    Abstract: A system that detects audio including speech using a spherical sensor array estimates a direction of arrival of the speech using a Kalman filter. To improve the estimates of the Kalman filter, the system estimates a noise covariance matrix, representing noise detected by the array. The structure of the noise covariance matrix is determined, using an assumption of spherically isotropic diffuse noise. The intensity of the noise covariance matrix is estimated based on the intensity of audio detected by the array.
    Type: Grant
    Filed: December 24, 2014
    Date of Patent: January 31, 2017
    Assignee: AMAZON TECHNOLOGIES, INC.
    Inventors: John Walter McDonough, Jr., Volker Sebastian Leutnant, Sri Venkata Surya Siva Rama Krishna Garimell, Spyridon Matsoukas
  • Efficient dereverberation in networked audio systems
    Patent number: 9390723
    Abstract: Features are disclosed for performing efficient dereverberation of speech signals captured with single- and multi-channel sensors in networked audio systems. Such features could be used in applications requiring automatic recognition of speech captured with sensors. Dereverberation is performed in the sub-band domain, and hence provides improved dereverberation performance in terms of signal quality, algorithmic delay, computational efficiency, and speed of convergence.
    Type: Grant
    Filed: December 11, 2014
    Date of Patent: July 12, 2016
    Inventors: John Walter McDonough, Jr., Wai Chung Chu, Amit Singh Chhetri, Robert Ayrapetian