Title: An auditory periphery model for improving narrow-band noise recognition rate of underwater targets

Author(s): LIN Zhengqing; QIU Mengran; BA Wei;

Affiliation(s): Science and Technology on Underwater Test and Control Laboratory

Abstract: The recognition rate of the auditory periphery features decreases when the model is used to identify underwater targets in practice. To solve this problem, an improved method based on Gammatone filter bank is proposed. Firstly, after the reason of the decreasing of the recognition results is analyzed, the mechanism of multichannel data acquisition in acoustic engineering may narrow down signal frequency range, which leads to time-frequency features distortion. Secondly, the Gammatone filter bank is implemented to simulate frequency decomposition characteristics of human ear basilar membrane. Since the class information of the underwater noise signal is mostly contained in low frequency range, the auditory features of the conventional model are interpolated and the channel number of the filter bank and the central frequency of each frequency band are adjusted accordingly to obtain a 27-dimensional feature vector of the narrow-band target signal. The adjusted model may reflect the target's time-frequency feature more precisely. Finally, the performance of the auditory features is tested by a Neural Network classifier. The experiment results show that the modified auditory model is more effective than the conventional ones. The major information contained in broadband signals is reserved and the classification ability for real targets is further enhanced. The recognition results are increased from 82.59% to 88.80%. The modified auditory features effectively improve the recognition rate for underwater target radiated noise signals.