Patent ID: 7505902

Claim:
A method for discriminating sounds in an audio signal comprising the steps of: forming an auditory spectrogram from the audio signal, said auditory spectrogram characterizing a physiological response to sound represented by the audio signal; establishing a plurality of modulation-selective filters tuned to a range of frequency and temporal modulations of said auditory spectrogram; filtering said auditory spectrogram into a plurality of multidimensional, time-varying cortical response signals, each of said cortical response signals indicative of the frequency modulations of said auditory spectrogram over a corresponding predetermined range of scales and of the temporal modulations of said auditory spectrogram over a corresponding predetermined range of rates; decomposing said cortical response signals into orthogonal multidimensional component signals; said cortical response signals existing in a cubic representation of rate, scale, and frequency components prior to the step of decompositiom; said orthogonal multidimensional component signals including multiple scales of time and spectral resolution; truncating said orthogonal multidimensional component signals; and classifying said truncated component signals to discriminate therefrom a signal corresponding to a predetermined sound.