When a target voice is masked by an increasingly similar masker voice, increases in energetic masking are likely to occur due to increased spectro-temporal overlap in the competing speech waveforms. However, the impact of this increase may be obscured by informational masking effects related to the increased confusability of the target and masking utterances. In this study, the effects of targe...

When dealing with copyright protection for audio, watermarking can be considered to label the digital medium, by hiding information into the data. To make the watermark imperceptible and robust against some signal processing, we propose in this paper a new method based on frequential substitution, for which the bit error rate is lower than those obtained with existing methods. For such a purpos...

In part I we showed that with spatially non-overlapping targets and masks both local metacontrast-like interactions and attentional processes are involved in backward masking. In this second part we extend the strategy of varying the contents of masks to pattern masking where targets and masks overlap in space, in order to compare different masking theories. Images of human faces were backward-...

Strong visual masking originates from sensory perceptual interactions between target and mask and also from attentional competition between target and mask even though mask does not correspond to attentional control settings. The relative contributions of these different masking mechanisms are difficult to estimate. One strategy to begin approach this problem is to use the same stimulus as a ma...

In this paper, we propose a speech enhancement method by exploiting masking properties of human auditory system. The masking properties are exploited to calculate a masking threshold. The spectral components which lie above the threshold are audible to human listeners. These audible spectral components in the proposed method are suppressed as a predefined attenuation factor of the original nois...

e present a simplified dual-channel discrimination model with spatio-temporal filters to represent the t s visual system contrast sensitivity, and masking based on local spatio-temporal contrast energy. The contras ensitivity filter parameters of the model were based on previous work. The masking and global sensitivity h t parameters are calibrated to masking data using brief grating target sig...

This paper presents a comprehensive distortion metric for digital color images. It is based on a normalization model of the human visual system that incorporates color perception. The model is shown to accurately fit psychophysical contrast sensitivity data as well as intraand inter-channel contrast masking data from several different psychophysical experiments. The output of the metric is comp...

This is the second in a series of two papers on masking. The objective of these papers is to develop a masking protocol that provides valid measures of threshold and is, in general, faster than the plateau method. In the first paper, a masking method was presented that can replace the traditional plateau method in most masking situations. This new method is optimized to require fewer masking le...