On the role of localization cues in binaural segregation of reverberant speech

Approaches to binaural and stereo speech segregation have often assumed that localization information can be used as a primary cue to achieve segregation of a target signal. Results produced by these systems degrade significantly in the presence of room reverberation. In this work, we present an alternative framework to achieve localization of groups of time-frequency units. We show that grouping across time and frequency allows the use of localization as an important cue for sequential grouping of time-frequency objects. We analyze the level of time-frequency grouping needed to achieve accurate object localization and show preliminary binaural segregation results using the proposed framework. Results indicate that both localization and segregation performance can be improved by grouping across time and frequency.