Auditory motivated front-end for noisy speech using spectro-temporal modulation filtering

The robustness of the human auditory system to noise is partly due to the peak preserving capability of the periphery and the cortical filtering of spectro-temporal modulations. In this letter, a robust speech feature extraction scheme is developed that emulates this processing by deriving a spectrographic representation that emphasizes the high energy regions. This is followed by a modulation filtering step to preserve only the important spectro-temporal modulations. The features derived from this representation provide significant improvements for speech recognition in noise and language identification in radio channel speech. Further, the experimental analysis shows congruence with human psychophysical studies.