Objets Sonores: Une Représentation Bio-Inspirée Hiérarchique Parcimonieuse À Très Grandes Dimensions Utilisable En Reconnaissance; Auditory Objects: Bio-Inspired Hierarchical Sparse High Dimensional Representation for Recognition

The emphasis is put on the hierarchical structure, independence and sparseness aspects of auditory signal representations in high-dimensional spaces, so as to define the components of auditory objects. The concept of an auditory object and its neural representation is introduced. An illustrative application then follows, consisting in the analysis of various auditory signals : speech, music and natural outdoor environments. A new automatic speech recognition (ASR) system is then proposed and compared to a conventional statistical system. The proposed system clearly shows that an object-based analysis introduces a great flexibility and robustness for the task of speech recognition. The integration of knowledge from neuroscience and acoustic signal processing brings new ways of thinking to the field of classification of acoustic signals.