Adjacent-channel inhibition in acoustic onset detection

Simple acoustic onset detectors respond to sudden changes in energy levels. Unfortunately, they respond to frequency modulation as well as to amplitude modulation, and have high false-alarm rates in the presence of siren or chirp signals. The authors show how adjacent-channel inhibition can be used to greatly reduce the false-alarm rate. An LMS procedure is used to obtain optimal inhibitory weights. Computer simulations reveal how the response to chirps varies with the rate of change of instantaneous frequency.<<ETX>>