Defence R&D Canada - Atlantic, P.O. Box 1012, Dartmouth, Nova Scotia B2Y 3Z7, Canada.
J Acoust Soc Am. 2011 Sep;130(3):1287-98. doi: 10.1121/1.3614549.
Human listening tests were conducted to investigate if participants could distinguish between samples of target echoes and clutter obtained from a broadband active sonar experiment. For each echo, the listeners assigned a rating based on how confident they were that it was a target echo or clutter. The measure of performance was the area under the binormal receiver-operating-characteristic (ROC) curve, A(z). The mean performance was A(z)=0.95 ± 0.04 when signals were presented with their full available acoustic bandwidth of approximately 0-2 kHz. It was A(z)=0.77 ± 0.08 when the bandwidth was reduced to 0.5-2 kHz. The error bounds are stated as 95% confidence intervals. These results show that the listeners could definitely hear differences, but their performance was significantly degraded when the low-frequency signal information was removed. The performance of an automatic aural classifier was compared against this human-performance baseline. Results of statistical tests showed that it outperformed 2 of 13 listeners and 5 of 9 human listeners in the full-bandwidth and reduced-bandwidth tests, respectively, and performed similarly to the other listeners. Given its performance, the automatic aural classifier may prove beneficial to Navy sonar systems.
人类听力测试用于调查参与者是否能够区分宽带主动声纳实验中获得的目标回波和杂波样本。对于每个回波，听众根据他们对回波或杂波是目标的置信程度进行评分。性能的衡量标准是双正态接收者操作特性（ROC）曲线下的面积，A(z)。当信号以其大约 0-2 kHz 的全可用声带宽呈现时，平均性能为 A(z)=0.95 ± 0.04。当带宽降低到 0.5-2 kHz 时，平均性能为 A(z)=0.77 ± 0.08。误差界限表示为 95%置信区间。这些结果表明，听众肯定能听到差异，但当低频信号信息被移除时，他们的性能会显著下降。听觉自动分类器的性能与人类表现基准进行了比较。统计测试的结果表明，它在全带宽和降低带宽测试中分别优于 13 名听众中的 2 名和 9 名听众中的 5 名，并且与其他听众的表现相似。鉴于其性能，听觉自动分类器可能对海军声纳系统有益。
