Signal processing for hearing impairment.
Four noise reduction methods for use in sensory aids for hearing impairment were evaluated. These include a two-microphone adaptive noise canceller, short-term Wiener filtering, a transformed spectrum subtraction technique, and sinusoidal modelling. The largest improvements in speech recognition were obtained with the two-microphone adaptive noise canceller in a moderately reverberant room. Significant improvements were also obtained for short-term Wiener filtering for some hearing-impaired subjects. The transformed spectrum-subtraction technique failed to improve performance as the front-end of a hearing aid, but yielded improvements in performance as a preprocessor for the Nucleus Cochlear Implant. Sinusoidal modelling resulted in significant improvements in signal-to-noise ratio, but without a corresponding improvement in speech intelligibility.
Levitt
H
H
Center for Research in Speech and Hearing Sciences, Graduate School, City University of New York, NY 10036.
Bakke
M
M
Kates
J
J
Neuman
A
A
Schwander
T
T
Weiss
M
M
D000161:Acoustic Stimulation; D003054:Cochlear Implants; D004867:Equipment Design; D005069:Evaluation Studies as Topic; D005260:Female; D005500:Follow-Up Studies; D006310:Hearing Aids; D006319:Hearing Loss, Sensorineural / Q000534:rehabilitation*; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D009622:Noise / Q000009:adverse effects*; D010700:Phonetics; D010865:Pilot Projects; D013067:Speech Perception; D013647:Task Performance and Analysis