A new approach to the separation of speech from speech-in-noise mixtures is the use of time-frequency (T-F) masking. Originated in the field of computational auditory scene analysis, T-F masking performs separation in the time-frequency domain. This article introduces the T-F masking concept and reviews T-F masking algorithms that separate target speech from either monaural or binaural mixtures...

Introduction The cocktail party effect refers to situations in which people must segregate auditory sources. One situation of interest is speech-in-speech comprehension, in which two types of masking are described: energetic masking produced when target and noise partially overlap in time and frequency; informational masking occurs when information from concurrent flows is of comparable nature....

Speech understanding in noise is affected by both the energetic and informational masking components of the background noise. In addition, when the background noise is everyday speech, the relative contributions of the energetic and informational masking components to the overall difficulties in understanding speech are unclear. This study estimated informational masking effects, in conversatio...

We analyzed the relationship between U-shaped and monotonic-shaped masking functions, using both computer simulations of quantitative models and experimental data Our analysis revealed that quantitative models of backward masking predict that U-shaped masking functions should appear for weak masks and monotonic masking functions should appear for strong masks. The models predict, moreover, that...

Results were reported of psychophysical forward-masking experiments using a lateralization method. A general interpretation of masking was given, considering masking to be the combined result of three different mechanisms: the overlap mechanism, the adaptation mechanism, and the suppression mechanism. The aim of this study was to demonstrate the use of the lateralization method in a masking exp...

A method to solve of the phase retrieval problem in a non-convex formulation for complex-valued objects with support constraint is proposed. It shown that two coded diffraction patterns (CDPs) obtained same Fresnel or Fraunhofer plane by masking an object two, direct and inverse, random binary amplitude masks, are sufficient reconstruct arbitrary up global phase. The general solution was found ...

Speaker recognition in mobile devices suffers from poor performance in noisy environments, necessitating the use of noisesuppression algorithms. These typically apply time-frequency masks – optimised on the signal statistics – to the noisy signal spectrum, suppressing the noise components while preserving the speech. Studies in the field of speech recognition demonstrate that ideal time-frequen...