De-noising of Signal using FIR Filters for Hearing Aids

Abstract

 Abstract: In Today's era health related issues are increasing day by day and one of them is hearing loss. Hearing aids have done wonders and helped people in this situation. Hearing aid is a small device that makes the sound loud and clear for the person who is unable to listen, communicate and could not participate actively in day to day activities. A hearing aid can help people to listen in different environments such as loudspeakers in the background, a loud train horn and different noisy situations etc. But the speech signals are degraded and corrupted by different types of noises such as train noise, car engine noise, loud speaker and traffic noise at different SNR levels like -2db, 5db, 10db. These speech signals need to be improved by removing the unwanted disturbances or interference called noise so that enhanced signal can be obtained with good quality for voice communication in hearing aids. This research work proposes the noise reduction technique using FIR filters for hearing aids. The approach of threshold will be applied to remove empty bands or unwanted noise from the noisy signal. The threshold based technique de-noises the input signal efficiently. The proposed approach is implemented in MATLAB and results are analyzed in terms of SNR (signal to noise ratio) and MSE (mean square error).