Source Separation with One Ear: Proposition for an Anthropomorphic Approach

We present an example of an anthropomorphic approach, in which auditory-based cues are combined with temporal correlation to implement a source separation system. The auditory features are based on spectral amplitude modulation and energy information obtained through 256 cochlear filters. Segmentation and binding of auditory objects are performed with a two-layered spiking neural network. The first layer performs the segmentation of the auditory images into objects, while the second layer binds the auditory objects belonging to the same source. The binding is further used to generate a mask (binary gain) to suppress the undesired sources from the original signal. Results are presented for a double-voiced (2 speakers) speech segment and for sentences corrupted with different noise sources. Comparative results are also given using PESQ (perceptual evaluation of speech quality) scores. The spiking neural network is fully adaptive and unsupervised.