Processing Strategies of the Auditory System for Improving the Detection of Masked Signals

The auditory system of mammals is a highly developed sensory system that facilitates the analysis and the communication in complex acoustical scenes. For the analysis of incoming sounds, the auditory systems makes use of a large variety of physical signal properties that are processed within various mechanical and neural processing stages along the auditory pathway. The scope of this thesis was to investigate processing strategies that contribute to the outstanding performance of the auditory system to detect signals in complex acoustical scenes. Using methods from psychoacoustics and signal processing techniques, it has been shown that a combination of coherent intensity fluctuations in different frequency regions and interaural disparities are processed in a highly efficient way. With the application of a physical nonlinear and active model of the cochlea, the basis was provided for separating contributions of mechanical and neural processing stages to the analysis of complex acoustical scenes.