Comparison of speech envelope extraction methods for EEG-based auditory attention detection in a cocktail party scenario

Recent research has shown that it is possible to detect which of two simultaneous speakers a person is attending to, using brain recordings and the temporal envelope of the separate speech signals. However, a wide range of possible methods for extracting this speech envelope exists. This paper assesses the effect of different envelope extraction methods with varying degrees of auditory modelling on the performance of auditory attention detection (AAD), and more specifically on the detection accuracy. It is found that sub-band envelope extraction with proper power-law compression yields best performance, and that the use of several more detailed auditory models does not yield a further improvement in performance.