Title: New approach for quality analysis of the hearing impaired using combined temporal and spectral processing

Authors: Hemangi Shinde; Vibha Vyas; Vikram C. Mathad

Addresses: Department of Electronics and Telecommunication Engineering, College of Engineering Pune, Pune-411005, India; Department of Electronics and Telecommunication Engineering, AISSMS Institute of Information Technology, Pune-411001, India ' Department of Electronics and Telecommunication Engineering, College of Engineering Pune, Pune-411005, India ' Department of Speech and Hearing Sciences, Arizona State University, Tempe, Arizona, USA

Abstract: This paper proposes a novel approach of combining temporal and spectral speech enhancement methods for hearing impaired (HI) listeners. The temporally processed speech is combined with five different types of maximum a-posterior (MAP) estimators, namely, magnitude squared spectrum estimator (MSSE), MSSE using posteriori SNR uncertainty, using priori SNR uncertainty, soft masking using posterior SNR uncertainty on magnitude squared spectrum and using priori SNR uncertainty on magnitude squared spectrum. The temporal, spectral and the combined temporal spectral algorithms are evaluated in terms of quality for HI listeners using noisy speech signals at -5, 0, 5 and 10 dB SNR in a cafeteria, a station, in traffic and train noise environments. The experimental results depict that the new combined temporal spectral algorithm showed significantly better results over the individual temporal, spectral methods as well as a previous combined temporal and spectral method investigated and tested by the author earlier for HI people.

Keywords: speech enhancement; hearing impaired; temporal processing; spectral processing; mean opinion score.

DOI: 10.1504/IJBET.2023.129817

International Journal of Biomedical Engineering and Technology, 2023 Vol.41 No.3, pp.231 - 257

Received: 15 Dec 2020
Accepted: 26 Apr 2021
Published online: 31 Mar 2023 *

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