Analysis of Monaural and Binaural Statistical Properties for the Estimation of Distance of a Target Speaker

摘要

The paper presents an auditory distance perception model that is based on the extraction of statistical properties from monaural and binaural features in a reverberant room environment. The developed framework has considered both mono and stereo speech signals originated from different distances at various reverberation time periods. Hence, two models, namely single-channel monaural statistics and binaural-channel monaural statistics, have been discussed in this study. The distance-dependent statistical features from fused monaural coefficients, namely cepstral and envelope features, are chosen as an input to the different classification algorithms such as Gaussian mixture model-expectation maximization, support vector machine and random forest for the estimation of distance of a desired target user. The monaural coefficients are extracted in addition with the binaural cues, such as interaural time and level differences and interaural coherence (ITD, ILD and IC) for the binaural speech signals and eventually applied for the estimation of distance. The proposed monaural and binaural models observe an average of more than 5% better results compared to existing baseline techniques even at lower signal-to-noise ratio, 0 dB.