Symmetry and Asymmetry in Audio and Speech Processing

A special issue of Symmetry (ISSN 2073-8994). This special issue belongs to the section "Computer".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: 30 November 2026 | Viewed by 175

Special Issue Editors


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Guest Editor
Department of Computer Science, Multidisciplinary Faculty of Nador, Mohammed First University, Oujda 60000, Morocco
Interests: automatic speech recognition; acoustic feature engineering with symmetry analysis; pattern recognition; data analysis; natural language processing

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Guest Editor
Department of Computer Science, Multidisciplinary Faculty of Nador, Mohammed First University, Oujda 60000, Morocco
Interests: information systems; data mining; artificial intelligence

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Guest Editor
Department of Computer Science, Faculty of Science, Abdelmalek Essaâdi University, Tétouan 93000, Morocco
Interests: automatic speech recognition; acoustic feature engineering with symmetry analysis; pattern recognition; artificial intelligence

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

Speech recognition systems are now embedded in everyday applications (assistants, call analytics, smart rooms, medical/assistive tools), yet their performance often depends on symmetry assumptions that do not hold in practice. This Special Issue focuses on how symmetry and asymmetry arise, and can be leveraged or compensated, in the full pipeline from acoustic sensing to automatic speech recognition (ASR) and downstream speech understanding. We invite original contributions bridging statistical signal processing and machine learning to address asymmetric conditions such as non-uniform microphone placement, heterogeneous devices, different sampling rates/codecs, speaker and accent variability, left–right binaural differences, and train–test domain mismatch. Topics include symmetry/asymmetry-aware front ends (beamforming, source separation, dereverberation), robust feature learning, self-supervised and multilingual modeling, and end-to-end ASR that remains reliable under real noise and reverberation. To align with intelligent systems and cybersecurity research, we also welcome studies on privacy-preserving ASR, secure speech analytics, spoofing/deepfake detection, and adversarial robustness, especially when asymmetries amplify vulnerabilities. Submissions may propose new benchmarks, evaluation protocols, and deployable solutions (including edge/on-device ASR) that quantify and reduce the performance gap between symmetric laboratory settings and asymmetric real-world environments.

Dr. Mohamed Hamidi
Dr. Anas El Ansari
Dr. Ouissam Zealouk
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 250 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for assessment.

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Keywords

  • automatic speech recognition (ASR)
  • speech detection system
  • symmetry/asymmetry-aware learning
  • robust speech enhancement (noise/reverberation)
  • microphone arrays and beamforming
  • self-supervised speech representation learning
  • accent/dialect variability and domain adaptation
  • privacy-preserving speech recognition
  • spoofing/deepfake detection and security

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Published Papers

This special issue is now open for submission.
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