Speech Segregation Using an Event- Synchronous Auditory Image and Straight

We present new methods to segregate concurrent speech sounds using the auditory image model and a vocoder. The auditory representation of sound referred to as an 'auditory image' preserves fine temporal information, unlike conventional window-based processing systems. This makes it possible to segregate speech sources with an event synchronous procedure. Fundamental frequency information is used to estimate the sequence of glottal pulse times for a target speaker, and to repress the glottal events of other speakers. The procedure leads to robust extraction of the target speech and effective segregation even when the SNR is as low as 0 dB. Moreover, the segregation performance remains high when the speech contains jitter or when the fundamental frequency is not estimated perfectly. This contrasts with conventional comb filter methods where errors in event estimation produce a substantial reduction in performance. Test results suggest that this auditory segregation method has potential for speech enhancement in applications such