EURASIP Journal on Audio, Speech, and Music Processing

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Research Article
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Practical Gammatone-Like Filters for Auditory Processing

EURASIP Journal on Audio, Speech, and Music Processing20072007:063685

https://doi.org/10.1155/2007/63685

©  A. G. Katsiamis et al. 2007

Received: 10 October 2006

Accepted: 27 August 2007

Published: 13 December 2007

Abstract

This paper deals with continuous-time filter transfer functions that resemble tuning curves at particular set of places on the basilar membrane of the biological cochlea and that are suitable for practical VLSI implementations. The resulting filters can be used in a filterbank architecture to realize cochlea implants or auditory processors of increased biorealism. To put the reader into context, the paper starts with a short review on the gammatone filter and then exposes two of its variants, namely, the differentiated all-pole gammatone filter (DAPGF) and one-zero gammatone filter (OZGF), filter responses that provide a robust foundation for modeling cochlea transfer functions. The DAPGF and OZGF responses are attractive because they exhibit certain characteristics suitable for modeling a variety of auditory data: level-dependent gain, linear tail for frequencies well below the center frequency, asymmetry, and so forth. In addition, their form suggests their implementation by means of cascades of N identical two-pole systems which render them as excellent candidates for efficient analog or digital VLSI realizations. We provide results that shed light on their characteristics and attributes and which can also serve as "design curves" for fitting these responses to frequency-domain physiological data. The DAPGF and OZGF responses are essentially a "missing link" between physiological, electrical, and mechanical models for auditory filtering.

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Authors’ Affiliations

(1)
Department of Bioengineering, The Sir Leon Bagrit Centre, Imperial College London
(2)
Google Inc.

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Copyright

© A. G. Katsiamis et al. 2007

This article is published under license to BioMed Central Ltd. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.