Size identification and acoustic cues extraction of impacted plates

In the identification of impacted plate sizes, invariant acoustic cues and the role they play in the auditory perception are investigated. Three subjective evaluation experiments are designed. In the first experiment, the effect of recording and synthetic sounds for size identification is studied. Dissimilarity evaluation experiments (the second and third experiment) are designed for aluminum and wood plates, respectively, thereafter the perception space and the mechanical space are determined. The information accuracy of sound features are then calculated, which is used as the basis of feature selection. Finally, invariant acoustic cues are given from the comparison of the last two experiments, and size perception strategies are investigated based on the correlation between features and perception results. Then we conclude that listeners do well in size identification whether synthetic or recording sounds are used and tend to use invariant acoustic cues which have correlation with the size information, while ignoring acoustic information which can be easily affected by other sound sources attributes.