Monaural source separation using spectral cues

Pearlmutter, B. A., Zador, A. M. (2004) Monaural source separation using spectral cues. In: Independent Component Analysis and Blind Signal Separation. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 3195 . Springer-Verlag Berlin, Berlin, pp. 478-485. ISBN 0302-9743

Abstract

The acoustic environment poses at least two important challenges. First, animals must localise sound sources using a variety of binaural and monaural cues; and second they must separate sources into distinct auditory streams (the "cocktail party problem"). Binaural cues include intra-aural intensity and phase disparity. The primary monaural cue is the spectral filtering introduced by the head and pinnae via the head-related transfer function (HRTF), which imposes different linear filters upon sources arising at different spatial locations. Here we address the second challenge, source separation. We propose an algorithm for exploiting the monaural HRTF to separate spatially localised acoustic sources in a noisy environment. We assume that each source has a unique position in space, and is therefore subject to preprocessing by a different linear filter. We also assume prior knowledge of weak statistical regularities present in the sources. This framework can incorporate various aspects of acoustic transfer functions (echos, delays, multiple sensors, frequency-dependent attenuation) in a uniform fashion, treating them as cues for, rather than obstacles to, separation. To accomplish this, sources are represented sparsely in an overcomplete basis. This framework can be extended to make predictions about the neural representations required to separate acoustic sources.

Item Type: Book Section
Uncontrolled Keywords: BLIND SOURCE SEPARATION blind source separation SOUND LOCALIZATION sound localization AUDITORY SPACE auditory space SPARSE sparse PLASTICITY plasticity
Subjects: organism description > animal behavior
organism description > animal behavior > auditory
organism description > animal behavior > auditory > hearing
CSHL Authors:
Communities: CSHL labs > Zador lab
Depositing User: CSHL Librarian
Date: 2004
Date Deposited: 26 Jan 2012 17:39
Last Modified: 23 Feb 2017 20:41
URI: https://repository.cshl.edu/id/eprint/22459

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