Practical Considerations for Hardware Implementations of the Auditory Model and Evaluations in Real World Noisy Environments

Zero-Crossings with Peak Amplitudes(ZCPA) model motivated by human auditory periphery was proposed to extract reliable features speech signals even in noisy environments for robust speech recognition. In this paper, some practical considerations for digital hardware implementations of the ZCPA model are addressed and evaluated for recognition of speech corrupted by several real world noises as well as white Gaussian noise. Infinite impulse response(IIR) filters which constitute the cochliar filterbank of the ZCPA are replaced by hamming bandpass filters of which frequency responses are less similar to biological neural tuning curves. Experimental results demonstrate that the detailed frequency response of the cochlear filters are not critical to performance. Also, the sensitivity of the model output to the variations in microphone gain is investigated, and results in good reliability of the ZCPA model.