Cochlear implants are electronic devices that stimulate directly the auditory nerve to allow totally deaf patients to hear again. This paper presents an interactive evolutionary algorithm (IEA) designed to help finding the best parameters of a cochlear implant for a specific patient.If early cochlear implants only featured one electrode, modern devices now offer up to 22 electrodes, with the hope to be able to transmit more details and help the patient hear better. The work presented in this paper shows however that having more electrodes is not necessarily better.Tests on a patient show surprisingly that some combinations of electrodes yield better results than others, with the problem that there is no real way to determine which electrode is beneficial to speech understanding and which is not.The best result obtained by the patient on a speech understanding evaluation protocol was 48.5/100 after 10 years of fitting sessions by an expert practitioner. For many reasons explained in this paper, the evaluation of the best parameter setting found by the IEA in one day was 91.5/100.
In a previous SAC-COMPAHEC paper[1], a method was presented using an interactive evolutionary algorithm for cochlear implants fitting.The method has recently been put to test, with very unexpected and encouraging results: in a few words, it seems that the algorithm is capable to obtain much better results than an expert practitioner in many cases.The solutions proposed by the algorithm are counter-intuitive, yet they improve speech recognition drastically. If these preliminary results are confirmed by many more cases, it could mean that experts have been deterministically tuning cochlear implants the wrong way for many years.However, it seems that the very good results obtained by the algorithm depend a lot on the acoustic environment in which the fitting is performed. A broader fitting scheme has therefore been implemented that should overcome this problem, by allowing the patient to sample typical background noises for which the prosthesis should be specifically tuned.In the future, a piece of software will be added to the cochlear implant signal processor that will automatically choose the best setting depending on the kind of sound environment picked up by the microphone.
This paper proposes a 3D panoramic shape reconstruction method based on an uncalibrated stereovision system (USS) composed of five cameras circularly located around the object to be analysed. First, some interesting points are detected from markers placed on the object such that they are visible by two successive cameras of the USS. These points are then matched on both images acquired by a couple of successive cameras. This process is repeated for all the couples of cameras. Second, by using an evolutionary algorithm, the depth values of the different interesting points are calculated. A comparison with a traditional method based on calibrated cameras validates the accuracy of 3D information provided by the proposed method. Finally, by combining all the interesting points, a panoramic view of the object is obtained.
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