Better Speech Perception in Noise With an Assistive Multimicrophone Array for Hearing Aids

Luts, Heleen; Maj, Jean-Baptiste; Soede, Wim; Wouters, Jan

doi:10.1097/01.aud.0000145109.90767.ba

Cited by 25 publications

(14 citation statements)

References 27 publications

(30 reference statements)

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“…Establishing a link between the two hearing instruments allows us to benefit from the distance between the two ears and thus permits better beamforming resolution [1]. It is worth noting that the aforementioned limitation has fostered a substantial body of research focusing on the design of larger microphone arrays [12], possibly mounted on glasses [13] or in the shape of a necklace [14]. Other works have considered, as we do here, the array formed by connecting microphones available at both hearing aids [15]- [19].…”

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confidence: 99%

Rate-Constrained Collaborative Noise Reduction for Wireless Hearing Aids

Roy

Vetterli

2009

IEEE Trans. Signal Process.

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Abstract-Hearing aids are electronic, battery-operated sensing devices which aim at compensating various kinds of hearing impairments. Recent advances in low-power electronics coupled with progresses made in digital signal processing offer the potential for substantial improvements over state-of-the-art systems. Nevertheless, efficient noise reduction in complex listening scenarios remains a challenging task, partly due to the limited number of microphones that can be integrated on such devices. We investigate the noise reduction capability of hearing instruments that may exchange data by means of a rate-constrained wireless link and thus benefit from the signals recorded at both ears of the user. We provide the necessary theoretical results to analyze this collaboration mechanism under two different coding strategies. The first approach takes full benefit of the binaural correlation, while the second neglects it, since binaural statistics are difficult to estimate in a practical setting. The gain achieved by collaborating hearing aids as a function of the communication bit rate is then characterized, both in a monaural and a binaural configuration. The corresponding optimal rate allocation strategies are computed in closed form. While the analytical derivation is limited to a simple acoustic scenario, the latter is shown to capture many of the features of the general problem. In particular, it is observed that the loss incurred by coding schemes which do not consider the binaural correlation is rather negligible in a very noisy environment. Finally, numerical results obtained using real measurements corroborate the potential of our approach in a realistic scenario.Index Terms-Beamforming, binaural noise reduction, collaborating hearing aids, remote source coding with side information, spatial filtering, wireless link.

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mentioning

confidence: 99%

Rate-Constrained Collaborative Noise Reduction for Wireless Hearing Aids

Roy

Vetterli

2009

IEEE Trans. Signal Process.

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“…Microphone arrays with dimensions of the same order of the proposed system are used in several different areas of research, such as speech enhancement [23], [24], acoustic field analysis [25] and sound source separation [26]. In sound localization applications, however, such small configuration of microphones is not common practice due to its challenges and limitations, as shown along this section and in the conclusions.…”

Section: Binaural Localizationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Design of a Compact Sound Localization Device on a Stand-Alone FPGA-Based Platform

Kugler

Tossavainen

Kuroyanagi

et al. 2016

IEICE Trans. Inf. & Syst.

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SUMMARYSound localization systems are widely studied and have several potential applications, including hearing aid devices, surveillance and robotics. However, few proposed solutions target portable systems, such as wearable devices, which require a small unnoticeable platform, or unmanned aerial vehicles, in which weight and low power consumption are critical aspects. The main objective of this research is to achieve real-time sound localization capability in a small, self-contained device, without having to rely on large shaped platforms or complex microphone arrays. The proposed device has two surface-mount microphones spaced only 20 mm apart. Such reduced dimensions present challenges for the implementation, as differences in level and spectra become negligible, and only timedifference of arrival (TDoA) can be used as a localization cue. Three main issues have to be addressed in order to accomplish these objectives. To achieve real-time processing, the TDoA is calculated using zero-crossing spikes applied to the hardware-friendly Jeffers model. In order to make up for the reduction in resolution due to the small dimensions, the signal is upsampled several-fold within the system. Finally, a coherence-based spectral masking is used to select only frequency components with relevant TDoA information. The proposed system was implemented on a fieldprogrammable gate array (FPGA) based platform, due to the large amount of concurrent and independent tasks, which can be efficiently parallelized in reconfigurable hardware devices. Experimental results with white-noise and environmental sounds show high accuracies for both anechoic and reverberant conditions.

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“…A posição teste para o PINT Brasil foi S0º/R180º (figura 2), a fim de simular um ambiente de sala de aula (onde se supõe que a professora -principal fonte sonora-permanece a maior parte do tempo à frente da sala e o ruído competitivo da sala de aula é maior ao lado e atrás do aluno) conforme sugestão do guia de boas práticas para avaliação de microfone remoto da AAA (2008,2011 A seguir serão apresentados os seguintes tópicos para discussão, conforme descritos os resultados no capítulo anterior: listas do teste PINT Brasil aplicadas em crianças com audição normal e listas do teste PINT Brasil aplicadas em crianças com DA que fazem uso de IC e Sistema de FM. Segundo Jacob e Queiroz-Zattoni (2011) é bem estabelecido que indivíduos com DA com perdas auditivas de origem coclear têm mais dificuldade em perceber a fala em um ambiente ruidoso (KILLION, 1997a, KILLION, 1997b, LEWIS et al, 2004, MCFARLAND,2003, LUTS et al, 2004, necessitando de uma relação S/R de +15dB a +20 dB para a recepção inteligível da fala, sendo que indivíduos com audição normal precisam de uma relação S/R de +6 dB para a mesma tarefa (HAWKINS; YACULLO, 1984).…”

Section: Verificação E Validação Das Listas Do Pint Brasilunclassified

Phrases in Noise Test (PINT): adaptação cultural para o português brasileiro e aplicabilidade na avaliação do sistema de frequência modulada

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Better Speech Perception in Noise With an Assistive Multimicrophone Array for Hearing Aids

Abstract: These improvements in signal-to-noise ratio can be of great benefit for hearing aid users, who have difficulties with speech understanding in noisy environments.

Cited by 25 publications

References 27 publications

Rate-Constrained Collaborative Noise Reduction for Wireless Hearing Aids

Rate-Constrained Collaborative Noise Reduction for Wireless Hearing Aids

Design of a Compact Sound Localization Device on a Stand-Alone FPGA-Based Platform

Phrases in Noise Test (PINT): adaptação cultural para o português brasileiro e aplicabilidade na avaliação do sistema de frequência modulada

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