SPEECH ENHANCEMENT FOR HEARING AIDS

The performance of hearing aids in noisy reverberant surroundings remains a major source of complaint and discomfort to wearers. Given the current capabilities and pace of development in microelectronics, the major problem is to find successful speech enhancement schemes. “Binaural unmasking ” experiments demonstrate an enhancement advantage, due to binaural correlation properties, which can lower the hearing threshold in noise and there is evidence that this may operate in frequency sub-bands. The performance is presented of an adaptive sub-band noise cancellation scheme which supports the possibility of performing “binaural unmasking ” outwith the body, and is shown to be capable of out-performing a standard noise-cancellation scheme in the presence of reverberation. 1