Hearing impaired (HI) listeners often struggle to follow conversations when exposed in a complex acoustic environment. This is partly due to the reduced ability in recovering the target speech Temporal Envelope (ENV) cues from Temporal Fine Structure (TFS). This study investigates the enhancement of speech intelligibility in HI listeners by processing the ENV of speech signals corrupted by real-world environmental noise. An Encoder-Decoder Long Short Term Memory (LSTM) model is exploited after perceptually motivated processing stages to compensate for the important ENV characteristics of comprehensible speech for hearing impairment. The computational model is evaluated using the Short-Time Objective Intelligibility (STOI) measure for speech intelligibility. Finally, results indicate a 6% improvement in the mean STOI measure across different SNR values.

Authors: Thoidis, Iordanis; Vrysis, Lazaros; Pastiadis, Konstantinos; Markou, Konstantinos; Papanikolaou, George
Affiliation: Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Thessaloniki, Greece
AES Convention: 146 (March 2019) Paper Number: 10206
Publication Date: March 10, 2019 Import into BibTeX
Subject: Poster Session 4
Permalink: https://www.aes.org/e-lib/browse.cfm?elib=20339

Click to purchase paper as a non-member or login as an AES member. If your company or school subscribes to the E-Library then switch to the institutional version. If you are not an AES member and would like to subscribe to the E-Library then Join the AES!

This paper costs $33 for non-members and is free for AES members and E-Library subscribers.

Learn more about the AES E-Library

E-Library Location:   /conv/146/10206.pdf

Start a discussion about this paper!