title: Evaluation of the importance of time-frequency contributions to speech intelligibility in noise.
abstract: Recent studies on binary masking techniques make the assumption that each time-frequency (T-F) unit contributes an equal amount to the overall intelligibility of speech. The present study demonstrated that the importance of each T-F unit to speech intelligibility varies in accordance with speech content. Specifically, T-F units are categorized into two classes, speech-present T-F units and speech-absent T-F units. Results indicate that the importance of each speech-present T-F unit to speech intelligibility is highly related to the loudness of its target component, while the importance of each speech-absent T-F unit varies according to the loudness of its masker component. Two types of mask errors are also considered, which include miss and false alarm errors. Consistent with previous work, false alarm errors are shown to be more harmful to speech intelligibility than miss errors when the mixture signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) is below 0 dB. However, the relative importance between the two types of error is conditioned on the SNR level of the input speech signal. Based on these observations, a mask-based objective measure, the loudness weighted hit-false, is proposed for predicting speech intelligibility. The proposed objective measure shows significantly higher correlation with intelligibility compared to two existing mask-based objective measures.
authors.affiliation: Department of Electrical Engineering, Erik Jonsson School of Enigneering and Computer Science, University of Texas at Dallas, Richardson, Texas 75083.
authors.forename: Chengzhu
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Yu
authors.affiliation: Department of Electrical Engineering, Erik Jonsson School of Enigneering and Computer Science, University of Texas at Dallas, Richardson, Texas 75083.
authors.forename: Kamil K
authors.initials: KK
authors.lastname: Wójcicki
authors.affiliation: Department of Electrical Engineering, Erik Jonsson School of Enigneering and Computer Science, University of Texas at Dallas, Richardson, Texas 75083.
authors.forename: Philipos C
authors.initials: PC
authors.lastname: Loizou
authors.affiliation: Department of Electrical Engineering, Erik Jonsson School of Enigneering and Computer Science, University of Texas at Dallas, Richardson, Texas 75083.
authors.forename: John H L
authors.initials: JH
authors.lastname: Hansen
authors.affiliation: Speech and Signal Processing Laboratory, Marquette University, 1515 West Wisconsin Avenue, Milwaukee, Wisconsin 53201-1881.
authors.forename: Michael T
authors.initials: MT
authors.lastname: Johnson
mesh_terms: D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D000465:Algorithms; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008144:Loudness Perception / Q000502:physiology; D008297:Male; D008959:Models, Neurological; D008960:Models, Psychological; D009622:Noise; D010470:Perceptual Masking / Q000502:physiology*; D011571:Psychoacoustics; D059629:Signal-To-Noise Ratio; D013018:Sound Spectrography; D013065:Speech Intelligibility / Q000502:physiology*; D013067:Speech Perception / Q000502:physiology*; D013997:Time Factors; D055815:Young Adult