Abstract
Because the hearing impaired often experience different degrees of hearing loss along with the loss of frequencies, the loudness compensation algorithm in hearing aids decomposes the speech signal and compensates with different frequency bands based on their audiograms. However, the speech quality of the compensated signal is unsatisfactory because the traditional filterbanks fail to fully consider the characteristics of human hearing and personalized hearing loss. In this study, an effective design for the gammachirp filterbank for the loudness compensation algorithm was proposed to improve the speech quality of hearing aids. Firstly, a multichannel gammachirp filterbank was employed to decompose the signals. Then, the adjacent bands were merged into one channel, guided by the proposed combination method. After obtaining the personalized filterbank, each band conducted a loudness compensation to match the requirements of the audiograms. The excellent advantage of the gammachirp filterbank is that it can simulate the characteristics of the basilar membrane. Furthermore, the novel channel combination method considers the information from the audiograms and the relationship between frequency ranges and speech intelligibility. The experimental results showed that the proposed multichannel gammachirp filterbank achieves better speech signal decomposition and synthesis, and good performance can be gained with fewer channels. The loudness compensation algorithm based on the gammachirp filterbank effectively improves sentence intelligibility. The sentence recognition rate of the proposed method is higher than that of a system with a gammatone filterbank by approximately 13%.
Funder
National Key Research and Development Program of China;
National Natural Science Foundation of China
Subject
Fluid Flow and Transfer Processes,Computer Science Applications,Process Chemistry and Technology,General Engineering,Instrumentation,General Materials Science
Cited by
2 articles.
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1. A Non-Intrusive Speech Quality Evaluation Method Based on the Audiogram and Weighted Frequency Information for Hearing Aid;IEICE Transactions on Fundamentals of Electronics, Communications and Computer Sciences;2023-01-01
2. A Wind Noise Detection and Suppression Method in Digital Hearing Aid;2022 International Conference on Networks, Communications and Information Technology (CNCIT);2022-06