Telephone speech enhancement for hearing-impaired listeners using multi-channel compression
Harikrishna P. Natarajan, Ashok Kumar Krishnamurthy, Lawrence L. Feth · The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America · 2002
Elderly listeners with sensorineural hearing impairment usually have difficulty with telephone communication if they do not use a hearing aid or telephone amplifier. In many cases, these devices may not be readily available or maybe uncomfortable to use. We describe here an alternative strategy to enhance the speech by pre-processing the signal before sending it over the telephone line. The pre-processing is based on a multi-channel compression algorithm that modifies the critical band spectrum of the speech signal to bring it within the dynamic hearing range of the listener, while also compensating for the effects of the telephone line. We describe the algorithm and the results of a simulation study in which the Articulation Index (AI) is used to measure the intelligibility enhancement, and the Glasberg, Moore and Stone (1999) model is used to simulate the effects of the hearing loss.