Computational Auditory Scene Analysis

How can we engineer systems capable of "cocktail party" listening?

Human listeners are able to perceptually segregate one sound
source from an acoustic mixture, such as a single voice from a
mixture of other voices and music at a busy cocktail party. How can
we engineer "machine listening" systems that achieve this
perceptual feat?

Albert Bregman's book Auditory Scene Analysis, published in
1990, drew an analogy between the perception of auditory scenes and
visual scenes, and described a coherent framework for understanding
the perceptual organization of sound. His account has stimulated
much interest in computational studies of hearing. Such studies are
motivated in part by the demand for practical sound separation
systems, which have many applications including noise-robust
automatic speech recognition, hearing prostheses, and automatic
music transcription. This emerging field has become known as
computational auditory scene analysis (CASA).

Computational Auditory Scene Analysis: Principles, Algorithms,
and Applications provides a comprehensive and coherent account of
the state of the art in CASA, in terms of the underlying
principles, the algorithms and system architectures that are
employed, and the potential applications of this exciting new
technology. With a Foreword by Bregman, its chapters are written by
leading researchers and cover a wide range of topics including:

* Estimation of multiple fundamental frequencies

* Feature-based and model-based approaches to CASA

* Sound separation based on spatial location

* Processing for reverberant environments

* Segregation of speech and musical signals

* Automatic speech recognition in noisy environments

* Neural and perceptual modeling of auditory organization

The text is written at a level that will be accessible to
graduate students and researchers from related science and
engineering disciplines. The extensive bibliography accompanying
each chapter will also make this book a valuable reference source.
A web site accompanying the text, href="http://www.casabook.org/">http://www.casabook.org,
features software tools and sound demonstrations.