Factors influencing intelligibility of ideal binary-masked speech: Implications for noise reduction
- 1 March 2008
- journal article
- research article
- Published by Acoustical Society of America (ASA) in The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America
- Vol. 123 (3), 1673-1682
- https://doi.org/10.1121/1.2832617
Abstract
The application of the ideal binary mask to an auditory mixture has been shown to yield substantial improvements in intelligibility. This mask is commonly applied to the time–frequency representation of a mixture signal and eliminates portions of a signal below a signal-to-noise-ratio (SNR) threshold while allowing others to pass through intact. The factors influencing intelligibility of ideal binary-masked speech are not well understood and are examined in the present study. Specifically, the effects of the local SNR threshold, input SNR level, masker type, and errors introduced in estimating the ideal mask are examined. Consistent with previous studies, intelligibility of binary-masked stimuli is quite high even at SNR for all maskers tested. Performance was affected the most when the masker dominated units were wrongly labeled as target-dominated units. Performance plateaued near 100% correct for SNR thresholds ranging from . The existence of the plateau region suggests that it is the pattern of the ideal binary mask that matters the most rather than the local SNR of each unit. This pattern directs the listener’s attention to where the target is and enables them to segregate speech effectively in multitalker environments.
Keywords
This publication has 27 references indexed in Scilit:
- Subjective comparison and evaluation of speech enhancement algorithmsSpeech Communication, 2007
- Factors influencing glimpsing of speech in noiseThe Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 2007
- Visually-guided Attention Enhances Target Identification in a Complex Auditory SceneJournal of the Association for Research in Otolaryngology, 2007
- Determination of the Potential Benefit of Time-Frequency Gain ManipulationEar & Hearing, 2006
- A noise-estimation algorithm for highly non-stationary environmentsSpeech Communication, 2006
- Monaural Speech Segregation Based on Pitch Tracking and Amplitude ModulationIEEE Transactions on Neural Networks, 2004
- A model of auditory streamingThe Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 1997
- Primitive auditory segregation based on oscillatory correlationCognitive Science, 1996
- Effects of fluctuating noise and interfering speech on the speech-reception threshold for impaired and normal hearingThe Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 1990
- Speech enhancement using a minimum mean-square error log-spectral amplitude estimatorIEEE Transactions on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing, 1985