Phoneme recognition with a model of binaural hearing

This work presents a method for phoneme recognition based on a model of the human binaural auditory system. Performance of the binaural system is compared to that of an equivalent monaural system across a range of signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs) and simulated azimuth separations of speech and noise sources. Comparison of binaural and monaural phoneme recognition accuracy for both speech and noise at 0/spl deg/ suggests an effective increase in SNR of 5 dB for the binaural system. Experiments are also conducted to investigate binaural system performance for speech and noise at differing azimuth angles. Two binaural speech and noise conditions are considered: i) speech from 0/spl deg/ plus noise from 0/spl deg/; and ii) speech from 0/spl deg/ plus noise from 90/spl deg/. A comparison of relative performance differences for each binaural system with the monaural system shows the greatest increase in phoneme recognition accuracy when the speech and noise are simulated using different azimuth angles (0/spl deg/ speech plus noise from 90/spl deg/).