Department of Neurosciences, Experimental Oto-rhino-laryngology, Leuven, Belgium.
Department of Electrical Engineering (ESAT), Stadius Center for Dynamical Systems, Signal Processing and Data Analytics, Leuven, Belgium.
Elife. 2021 Apr 30;10:e56481. doi: 10.7554/eLife.56481.
In a multi-speaker scenario, the human auditory system is able to attend to one particular speaker of interest and ignore the others. It has been demonstrated that it is possible to use electroencephalography (EEG) signals to infer to which speaker someone is attending by relating the neural activity to the speech signals. However, classifying auditory attention within a short time interval remains the main challenge. We present a convolutional neural network-based approach to extract the locus of auditory attention (left/right) without knowledge of the speech envelopes. Our results show that it is possible to decode the locus of attention within 1-2 s, with a median accuracy of around 81%. These results are promising for neuro-steered noise suppression in hearing aids, in particular in scenarios where per-speaker envelopes are unavailable.
在多说话人场景中,人类听觉系统能够专注于一个特定感兴趣的说话人,而忽略其他人。已经证明,通过将神经活动与语音信号相关联,使用脑电图 (EEG) 信号推断某人正在关注哪个说话人是可能的。然而,在短时间间隔内对听觉注意力进行分类仍然是主要挑战。我们提出了一种基于卷积神经网络的方法,无需了解语音包络即可提取听觉注意力的位置(左/右)。我们的结果表明,在 1-2 秒内解码注意力位置是可能的,中位数准确率约为 81%。这些结果对于助听器中的神经引导噪声抑制是有希望的,特别是在每个说话人包络不可用的情况下。