Title: A BIOLOGICALLY-INSPIRED APPROACH TO THE COCKTAIL PARTY PROBLEM
Authors: Mounya Elhilali and Shihab Shamma

Speaker: Rien Beal
Time : 2:10 - 3 Thursday
Location: 2222 Coover

Abstract
Though seemingly effortless, our auditory system engages in
complex processes and transformations which enable us to
segregate speech and other sounds in cocktail party settings.
This paper presents a computational approach to modelling
monaural auditory scene analysis, where we attempt to account
for perceptual and neuronal findings of receptive field
selectivity and adaptation in the auditory cortex. The model
introduces a biologically-inspired scheme of dynamic segregation
of auditory streams, based on unsupervised clustering
and the statistical theory of Kalman prediction. Our method
demonstrates its ability to emulate known percepts reported
by human subjects in auditory streaming and sound organization
tests, and yields successful results in segregating speech
from concurrent speaker and music interferences.