Envelope expansion methods for speech enhancement

Clarkson, Peter; Bahgat, S. F.

doi:10.1121/1.400538

Cited by 31 publications

(13 citation statements)

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“…Several spectral enhancement techniques have been tested using NH and hearing-impaired (HI) listeners in attempts to improve their speech understanding in noise (Baer et al, 1993;Bunnell, 1990;Clarkson and Bahgat, 1991;Franck et al, 1999;Lyzenga et al, 2002). In particular, Lyzenga et al (2002) used a spectral expansion scheme to enhance parts of the spectrum corresponding to vowel formants.…”

mentioning

confidence: 98%

Combined spectral and temporal enhancement to improve cochlear-implant speech perception

Bhattacharya

Vandali²,

Zeng

2011

The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America

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The present study examined the effect of combined spectral and temporal enhancement on speech recognition by cochlear-implant (CI) users in quiet and in noise. The spectral enhancement was achieved by expanding the short-term Fourier amplitudes in the input signal. Additionally, a variation of the Transient Emphasis Spectral Maxima (TESM) strategy was applied to enhance the short-duration consonant cues that are otherwise suppressed when processed with spectral expansion. Nine CI users were tested on phoneme recognition tasks and ten CI users were tested on sentence recognition tasks both in quiet and in steady, speech-spectrum-shaped noise. Vowel and consonant recognition in noise were significantly improved with spectral expansion combined with TESM. Sentence recognition improved with both spectral expansion and spectral expansion combined with TESM. The amount of improvement varied with individual CI users. Overall the present results suggest that customized processing is needed to optimize performance according to not only individual users but also listening conditions.

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confidence: 98%

Combined spectral and temporal enhancement to improve cochlear-implant speech perception

Bhattacharya

Vandali²,

Zeng

2011

The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America

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“…Therefore, several investigations have been carried out to study the usefulness of envelope enhancement in improving speech understanding in the presence of noise in individuals with hearing impairment (Apoux et al, 2001;Clarkson & Bahgat, 1991;Fu & Shannon, 1998). However, the results of these studies were equivocal.…”

Section: Sumariomentioning

confidence: 97%

Perception of speech with envelope enhancement in individuals with auditory neuropathy and simulated loss of temporal modulation processing

Narne

Vanaja²

2009

International Journal of Audiology

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Individuals with auditory neuropathy (AN) often suffer from temporal processing deficits causing speech perception difficulties. In the present study an envelope enhancement scheme that incorporated envelope expansion was used to reduce the effects of temporal deficits. The study involved two experiments. In the first experiment, to simulate the effects of reduced temporal resolution, temporally smeared speech stimuli were presented to listeners with normal hearing. The results revealed that temporal smearing of the speech signal reduced identification scores. With the envelope enhancement of the speech signal prior to being temporally smeared, identification scores improved significantly compared to temporally smeared condition. The second experiment assessed speech perception in twelve individuals with AN, using unprocessed and envelope-enhanced speech signals. The results revealed improvement in speech identification scores for the majority of individuals with AN when the envelope of the speech signal was enhanced. However, envelope enhancement was not able to improve speech identification scores for individuals with AN who had very poor unprocessed speech scores. Overall, the results of the present study suggest that applying envelope enhancement strategies in hearing aids might provide some benefits to many individuals with AN.

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“…While amplitude compression was shown to have detrimental effects on speech intelligibility for normal-hearing (NH) and hearing-impaired (HI) listeners (Plomp, 1988;Fu and Shannon, 1999;van Buuren et al, 1999), moderate envelope expansion was found to be beneficial especially in adverse listening conditions (Clarkson and Bahgat, 1991;Fu and Shannon, 1999). Fu and Shannon (1999) reported a small decrease in speech intelligibility in quiet for the expansion of the envelope by a power law function.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The potential of onset enhancement for increased speech intelligibility in auditory prostheses

Koning

Wouters

2012

The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America

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Recent studies have shown that transient parts of a speech signal contribute most to speech intelligibility in normal-hearing listeners. In this study, the influence of enhancing the onsets of the envelope of the speech signal on speech intelligibility in noisy conditions using an eight channel cochlear implant vocoder simulation was investigated. The enhanced envelope (EE) strategy emphasizes the onsets of the speech envelope by deriving an additional peak signal at the onsets in each frequency band. A sentence recognition task in stationary speech shaped noise showed a significant speech reception threshold (SRT) improvement of 2.5 dB for the EE in comparison to the reference continuous interleaved sampling strategy and of 1.7 dB when an ideal Wiener filter was used for the onset extraction on the noisy signal. In a competitive talker condition, a significant SRT improvement of 2.6 dB was measured. A benefit was obtained in all experiments with the peak signal derived from the clean speech. Although the EE strategy is not effective in many real-life situations, the results suggest that there is potential for speech intelligibility improvement when an enhancement of the onsets of the speech envelope is included in the signal processing of auditory prostheses.

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Envelope expansion methods for speech enhancement

Cited by 31 publications

References 0 publications

Combined spectral and temporal enhancement to improve cochlear-implant speech perception

Combined spectral and temporal enhancement to improve cochlear-implant speech perception

Perception of speech with envelope enhancement in individuals with auditory neuropathy and simulated loss of temporal modulation processing

The potential of onset enhancement for increased speech intelligibility in auditory prostheses

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