Multi-microphone adaptive noise reduction strategies for coordinated stimulation in bilateral cochlear implant devices.
Bilateral cochlear implant (BI-CI) recipients achieve high word recognition scores in quiet listening conditions. Still, there is a substantial drop in speech recognition performance when there is reverberation and more than one interferers. BI-CI users utilize information from just two directional microphones placed on opposite sides of the head in a so-called independent stimulation mode. To enhance the ability of BI-CI users to communicate in noise, the use of two computationally inexpensive multi-microphone adaptive noise reduction strategies exploiting information simultaneously collected by the microphones associated with two behind-the-ear (BTE) processors (one per ear) is proposed. To this end, as many as four microphones are employed (two omni-directional and two directional) in each of the two BTE processors (one per ear). In the proposed two-microphone binaural strategies, all four microphones (two behind each ear) are being used in a coordinated stimulation mode. The hypothesis is that such strategies combine spatial information from all microphones to form a better representation of the target than that made available with only a single input. Speech intelligibility is assessed in BI-CI listeners using IEEE sentences corrupted by up to three steady speech-shaped noise sources. Results indicate that multi-microphone strategies improve speech understanding in single- and multi-noise source scenarios.
Department of Electrical Engineering, University of Texas at Dallas, Richardson, Texas 75080, USA.
Kostas
K
Kokkinakis
Philipos C
PC
Loizou
D000161:Acoustic Stimulation; D000328:Adult; D000368:Aged; D001302:Audiometry, Speech; D019929:Cochlear Implantation / Q000295:instrumentation*; D003054:Cochlear Implants; D032882:Comprehension; D012048:Correction of Hearing Impairment / Q000523:psychology; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D008875:Middle Aged; D009622:Noise / Q000009:adverse effects*; D010470:Perceptual Masking; D011474:Prosthesis Design; D012815:Signal Processing, Computer-Assisted; D013061:Speech Acoustics; D013065:Speech Intelligibility; D013067:Speech Perception; D014732:Vibration