A speech enhancement algorithm is proposed that exploits the masking properties of the human auditory system. The enhancement is formulated as a frequency domain constrained optimization problem. The noise components of the noisy speech are suppressed by a gain function subject to the constraint that both the signal distortion and residual noise should fall below the masking thresholds. Tempora...

Over the years, a variety of array processing techniques have been applied to the problem of enhancing degraded speech to improve automatic speech recognition. In this context, linear beamforming has long been the approach of choice, for reasons including good performance, robustness and analytical simplicity. While various nonlinear techniques – typically based to some extent on the study of a...

Frequency domain ICA has been used successfully to separate the utterances of interfering speakers in convolutive environments, see e.g. [6],[7]. Improved separation results can be obtained by applying a time frequency mask to the ICA outputs. After using the direction of arrival information for permutation correction, the time frequency mask is obtained with little computational effort. The pr...

Spatial frequency discrimination thresholds measured in a two-interval forced choice paradigm are virtually constant across inter-stimulus intervals ranging from 400 to 30,000 msec, demonstrating that an accurate representation of spatial frequency is maintained in short-term memory. This representation can be degraded by briefly flashing a grating during the retention interval. Moreover, this ...

People can recognize the meaning or gist of a scene from a single glance, and a few recent studies have begun to examine the sorts of information that contribute to scene gist recognition. The authors of the present study used visual masking coupled with image manipulations (randomizing phase while maintaining the Fourier amplitude spectrum; random image structure evolution [RISE]; J. Sadr & P....

A physiological model of the human auditory system with the aim at generating masked thresholds for arbitrary complex sound signals is evaluated with respect to nonlinear mechanisms in masking. In [1, 2] it was shown that the ear model is able to rebuild the level-dependency of spectral and temporal masking patterns, the asymmetry of masking between noise and tone, and the different detection t...