Cochlea-inspired sonar signal processing

Abstract

Many attempts have been made to model the signal transformations that occur in the mammalian cochlea, in particular with respect to modeling human hearing. Cochlea models that have been developed in the last few decades fall into several categories, e.g., electrical analogs, digital filter models, and incorporate different levels of complexity from entirely linear to strongly nonlinear. Similarly, the implementations used have included various numerical approaches as well as analog and digital hardware architectures. Mammalian hearing systems are known to be highly capable when it comes to analyzing sound from complex natural environments and soundscapes. It may hence be hypothesized that the signal transformations that occur in the cochlea play a critical role in facilitating these capabilities since the cochlea is positioned at the critical first stage of auditory signal encoding. The goal of the research presented here is to evaluate the signal transformations of the mammalian cochlea in the context of sonar signal processing, especially for automatic target recognition in difficult environments such as reverberant shallow water. The cochlea of bats could proof a suitable model for these applications since many bat species are known to be capable of solving demanding sonar tasks under difficult conditions and cluttered environments.Many attempts have been made to model the signal transformations that occur in the mammalian cochlea, in particular with respect to modeling human hearing. Cochlea models that have been developed in the last few decades fall into several categories, e.g., electrical analogs, digital filter models, and incorporate different levels of complexity from entirely linear to strongly nonlinear. Similarly, the implementations used have included various numerical approaches as well as analog and digital hardware architectures. Mammalian hearing systems are known to be highly capable when it comes to analyzing sound from complex natural environments and soundscapes. It may hence be hypothesized that the signal transformations that occur in the cochlea play a critical role in facilitating these capabilities since the cochlea is positioned at the critical first stage of auditory signal encoding. The goal of the research presented here is to evaluate the signal transformations of the mammalian cochlea in the context of...