Bio‐inspired signal detection mechanism for tongue click waveform used in human echolocation

Abstract

Human echolocation is the ability of an individual (which is often a blind person) to use his/her signal such as sound from tongue clicks to perceive the surrounding. Basically this requires the person to listen and analyse to the return echo of the tongue clicks. The main characteristics of the tongue click signal waveform have been reported, however the fundamental principle on a person's ability to identify his/her own signal is still vague. The possible detection mechanism of the tongue click signal waveform used in human echolocation technique is discussed and imitated it as artificial detection system. The proposed mechanism which is based on human hearing process in synthesising the signal illustrates that the detection performance is improved as compared to the detection performance by the traditional matched filtering technique. The findings of this Letter create new potential for the development of any artificial human echolocator system, sensor systems like radar and sonar as well as applications inspired by human echolocation miracles.

Ambiguity function analysis of human echolocator waveform by using gammatone filter processing

“…The benefit of GF processing are as follows: (i) its ability in resolving the rich contents of the signal in much detail [18], (ii) implementation in time‐domain to avoid the demanding complex spectral computation, which helps in miniature hardware design [19] compare to others auditory filter scheme. The needs of a specific number of channels used upon processing could be a drawback, but overall GF processing is still an ideal method in synthesising human echolocator click as reported in [12, 22]. Hereby, the scope of this paper is to focus on AF performance of synthesising the human echolocator click using an auditory filter which is limited to GF processing only.…”

“…The following study demonstrated that an ideal autocorrelation function (ACF) is achieved by adopting gammatone filter (GF) processing and solved the limitation encounter by matched filter (MF) method for human echolocation waveform [12]. Therefore, this study used GF approaches to synthesise sound signal prior to relay it into ambiguity function (AF) processing for analysis.…”

Texture Classification Using Spectral Entropy of Acoustic Signal Generated by a Human Echolocator

“…As a result, features of a true pair of transmission–echo signals are scattered within the same cluster. Improved detection of human mouth-clicks was achieved with a bio-inspired (BI) processing approached over the matched filter (MF) outcome [ 23 , 24 ]. The BI process utilized a gammatone filter (GF) process in order to synthesize the mouth-click that was used in the detection process.…”