Horst Hering
Eurocontrol
Network
Latest external collaboration on country level. Dive into details by clicking on the dots.
Publication
Featured researches published by Horst Hering.
information hiding | 2007
Konrad Hofbauer; Horst Hering
Analogue amplitude modulation radios are used for air/ ground voice communication between aircraft pilots and controllers. The identification of the aircraft, so far always transmitted verbally, could be embedded as a watermark in the speech signal and thereby prevent safety-critical misunderstandings. The first part of this paper presents an overview on this watermarking application. The second part proposes a speech watermarking algorithm that embeds data in the linear prediction residual of unvoiced narrowband speech at a rate of up to 2 kbit/s. A bit synchroniser is developed which enables the transmission over analogue channels and which reaches the optimal limit within one to two percentage points in terms of raw bit error rate. Simulations show the robustness of the method for the AWGN channel.
Speaker Classification II | 2007
Michael Neffe; Tuan Van Pham; Horst Hering; Gernot Kubin
In this contribution a novel system of speaker segmentation has been designed for improving safety on voice communication in air traffic control. In addition to the usage of the aircraft identification tag to assign speaker turns on the shared communication channel to aircrafts, speaker verification is investigated as an add-on attribute to improve security level effectively for the air traffic control. The verification task is done by training universal background models and speaker dependent models based on Gaussian mixture model approach. The feature extraction and normalization units are especially optimized to deal with small bandwidth restrictions and very short speaker turns. To enhance the robustness of the verification system, a cross verification unit is further applied. The designed system is tested with SPEECHDAT-AT and WSJ0 database to demonstrate its superior performance.
vehicular technology conference | 2006
Konrad Hofbauer; Horst Hering; Gernot Kubin
A system for measuring time-variant impulse responses and a database of such measurements for the aeronautical voice channel are presented. Maximum length sequences (MLS) are transmitted over the voice channel with a standard aeronautical radio and the received signals are recorded. For the purpose of synchronisation, both the transmitted and received signals are recorded in parallel with a GPS-based timing signal. The flight path of the aircraft is accurately tracked. A collection of recordings of MLS transmissions is generated during flights with a general aviation aircraft. The measurements cover a wide range of typical flight situations as well as static back-to-back calibrations. The resulting database is made available under a public licence free of charge. The estimated time-variant impulse responses provide a characterisation of the aeronautical voice channel. This characterisation is needed for improvements and add-ons to voice communication systems as in air traffic control, where the analogue radio will remain in use for many years to come.
integrated communications, navigation and surveillance conference | 2007
Miodrag Sajatovic; Dieter Eier; Thierry Virion; Horst Hering; Frederic Daviere
The EUROCONTROL Experimental Centre (EEC) developed an innovative concept called aircraft identification tag (AIT), which aims at: (i) Reducing voice communication errors by allowing the controller to visually identify the aircraft that is currently using the voice channel. (ii) Improving the security of controller-pilot voice communications by allowing authentication of received voice communications. In July 2006, EUROCONTROL launched an initial feasibility study on the AIT concept to provide EUROCONTROL with enough information to decide and give orientations for a full feasibility analysis of the AIT concept, in view of a possible operational implementation. This paper summarizes the findings of the second deliverable of this initial feasibility study - AIT equipment and implementation scenarios.
7th AIAA ATIO Conf, 2nd CEIAT Int'l Conf on Innov and Integr in Aero Sciences,17th LTA Systems Tech Conf; followed by 2nd TEOS Forum | 2007
Horst Hering; Konrad Hofbauer
The current voice communication system in use worldwide for Air Traffic Control (ATC) was standardised more than sixty years ago. Digital watermark technology for intellectual property right protection is part of many digital medias like music, pictures and videos. The EUROCONTROL Experimental Centre (EEC) proposed employing this mass-market technique to embed a digital signature as watermark in ATC voice communication. The project is called Aircraft Identification Tag (AIT). Watermarked speech allows the automatic identification of the originator of the received voice message in real-time. This AIT concept helps to increase the safety in ATC and secures the legacy voice communication system against malicious attacks. Embedding the destination address of the called aircraft into the controller’s speech would extend AIT’s safety benefit towards the aircraft by an automatically generated attention getter in the cockpit when the aircraft is called. For this, active controller cooperation is required. This paper proposes the replacement of the currently used ‘Push To Talk’ (PTT) switch by the concept of a selective PTT switch, with which the controller indicates the addressed aircraft. An early demonstrator of the selective PTT switch concept was presented to former controllers for a preliminary scenario-based evaluation of the usability. The results are positive.
The 26th Congress of ICAS and 8th AIAA ATIO | 2008
Horst Hering; Konrad Hofbauer
The capacity of the current ATC system is, among other factors, limited by the maximum number of aircraft that a controller can handle in a sector. This led in the past to a decrease of sector sizes in order to increase capacity. We study in this paper the impact of small sectors on the air-ground radio communication. Small sectors require a large number of radio channels, and the sector handovers generate multiple radio calls, which are workload for both controllers and pilots. We outline in this context an initial idea to make the control sectors transparent for the aircrew. With a network of radio base stations and reduced transmission powers a cell-based end-to-end communication system can potentially be established, without changing from analogue to digital radio. The aircraft transmits on the same frequency across all sectors, and the ground network routes the voice calls to the appropriate controllers. We briefly discuss potential benefits and issues of this concept and see a clear need for further research to determine the feasibility of this idea.
european signal processing conference | 2004
Martin Hagmüller; Horst Hering; Andreas Kröpfl; Gernot Kubin
language resources and evaluation | 2008
Konrad Hofbauer; Stefan Petrik; Horst Hering
document analysis systems | 2004
Horst Hering
Archive | 2008
Michael Neffe; Horst Hering; Gernot Kubin