Spectrogram processing in echolocation

Abstract

Echolocation behavior and neuronal representations of sound suggest that animal sonar can be modeled in terms of a spectrogram correlation process. Recent experimental results, however, indicate that bats may be sensitive to the fine structure of the signal-echo cross-correlation function (J. A. Simmons, Science 204, 1336). This sensitivity cannot be explained by cross correlation of spectrograms. Spectrogram deconvolution or an analysis-by-synthesis procedure can be used to reconstruct a signal from its spectrogram, aside from an arbitrary phase shift. Cross correlation of two such reconstructed signals, with the same arbitrary phase shift assigned to both, yields the required sensitivity to cross-correlation fine structure. The waveform reconstruction procedure is accurate only if spectrogram filters are not smooth window functions as in man-made processors, but have large time-bandwidth product, e.g., sharp rise and slow decay in the frequency domain, as in critical band models of hearing. This filter property insures that the filter ambiguity function has the same or larger support in the range-Doppler plane as the signal ambiguity function, a necessary condition for spectrogram deconvolution.

Cite this paper

@article{altes1983spectrogram,
  title = {{Spectrogram processing in echolocation}},
  author = {Altes, Richard A.},
  journal = {The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America},
  volume = {74},
  number = {S1},
  pages = {S33},
  year = {1983},
  doi = {10.1121/1.2020917}
}

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