On the role of localization cues in binaural segregation of reverberant speech

Abstract

Approaches to binaural and stereo speech segregation have often assumed that localization information can be used as a primary cue to achieve segregation of a target signal. Results produced by these systems degrade significantly in the presence of room reverberation. In this work, we present an alternative framework to achieve localization of groups of time-frequency units. We show that grouping across time and frequency allows the use of localization as an important cue for sequential grouping of time-frequency objects. We analyze the level of time-frequency grouping needed to achieve accurate object localization and show preliminary binaural segregation results using the proposed framework. Results indicate that both localization and segregation performance can be improved by grouping across time and frequency.Index Terms -Binaural sound localization, speech segregation, reverberation, computational auditory scene analysis.

Sequential Organization of Speech in Reverberant Environments by Integrating Monaural Grouping and Binaural Localization

“…In [15], pitch and ITD are used to achieve localization of simultaneous speakers in reverberant environments. Our prior work analyzed the impact of idealized monaural grouping on localization and segregation of speech in reverberant environments [16], and showed that pitch-based monaural grouping can be used to achieve accurate localization of multiple sources in noisy and reverberant environments [17].…”