US Patent 7853539 Discriminating speech and non-speech with regularized least squares

Sound discrimination techniques are disclosed that can be employed, for example, in the task of discriminating speech and non-speech in a noisy environment and other noise classification applications. In one particular embodiment, a classifier system is provided that includes a linear Regularized Least Squares classifier used directly on a high-dimensional cortical representation of the target sound. The regularization constant lambda (λ) can be selected automatically, yielding a parameter-free learning system. In addition, the high-dimensional hyperplane can be viewed directly in the cortical space, leading to greater interpretability of the classifier results.