Coding and Decoding Speech using a Biologically Inspired Coding System

A spike (event) based sound coding technique has been presented in this study where the spikes are similar to the spikes exhibited by type 1 fibers of the auditory nerve. This lossy coding technique has already been shown useful for inter-aural time difference based sound source direction finding. Here, we show that decoding and resynthesising this code can produce intelligible speech even using a small number of spike trains. We have used few composite techniques including speaker verification to assess the effectiveness of the coding technique on a large number of TIMIT sentences. This biologically inspired coding technique can provide suitable input for a spiking neural network, as well as maintaining the accurate time structure of sound.