The Institute of Communication Acoustics (IKA) is a facility of the Department of Electrical Engineering and Information Technology at Ruhr University Bochum (RUB) in Bochum, Germany.
Auditory communication and processing of acoustic signals occupies a dominant position in information science and technology; mobile communications, broadcasting services, hearing aids, and sound reinforcement systems being well known examples of its application areas. Furthermore, acoustic signal processing for man-machine communication is of great importance, e.g. in automatic speech recognition, dictation, and speech dialog systems, and for access control. Current research aims at making several modes of human-machine interaction (auditive, visual, tactile) concurrently available and integrated into novel applications.
The information technology aspects of communication acoustics rest on four pillars:
- physical acoustics,
- human perception (e.g. psychoacoustics),
- digital signal processing and
- machine learning
whereby the interactions between these areas are especially appealing. The Institute of Communication Acoustics embodies these topics in research and education.
The institute's research activities encompasses a wide range of topics, e.g.,