Towards a generalized monaural and binaural auditory model for psychoacoustics and speech intelligibility

TL;DR

This paper introduces a unified auditory model that combines monaural and binaural cues using a simplified, physiologically inspired processing stage, enhancing psychoacoustic and speech intelligibility analysis.

Contribution

It extends a monaural envelope power spectrum model with a fixed, physiologically motivated binaural stage, creating a unified framework for monaural and binaural auditory modeling.

Findings

The model effectively integrates monaural and binaural cues.

It reproduces psychoacoustic experiment results from literature.

The approach simplifies binaural processing while maintaining physiological relevance.

Abstract

Auditory perception involves cues in the monaural auditory pathways as well as binaural cues based on differences between the ears. So far auditory models have often focused on either monaural or binaural experiments in isolation. Although binaural models typically build upon stages of (existing) monaural models, only a few attempts have been made to extend a monaural model by a binaural stage using a unified decision stage for monaural and binaural cues. In such approaches, a typical prototype of binaural processing has been the classical equalization-cancelation mechanism, which either involves signal-adaptive delays and provides a single channel output or can be implemented with tapped delays providing a high-dimensional multichannel output. This contribution extends the (monaural) generalized envelope power spectrum model by a non-adaptive binaural stage with only a few, fixed output channels. The binaural stage resembles features of physiologically motivated hemispheric binaural processing, as simplified signal processing stages, yielding a 5-channel monaural and binaural matrix feature "decoder" (BMFD). The back end of the existing monaural model is applied to the 5-channel BMFD output and calculates short-time envelope power and power features. The model is evaluated and discussed for a baseline database of monaural and binaural psychoacoustic experiments from the literature.