Patent ID: 7495998

Claim:
A biomimetic processing system operative to process sensor signals in a biomimetic fashion to extract acoustic features therefrom, the sensor signals including a source acoustic signal of interest, comprising: (A) a biomimetic preprocessor, including for each sensor signal: (1) a filter bank operative to generate a plurality of frequency channels from the sensor signal; (2) for each frequency channel: (a) compression/rectification circuitry; (b) AGC circuitry; and (C) multi-threshold spike generation circuitry operative to generate a plurality of streams of spikes for a corresponding plurality of distinct sound level thresholds, each spike being a pulsatile electrical signal analogous to a biological action potential generated by a nerve fiber; (B) one or more feature extracting modules each employing event-based processing on the streams of spikes to extract corresponding acoustic features; and (C) a feature integration module operative in response to the acoustic features from the feature extracting modules to generate an output identifying a location of the source acoustic signal of interest.