Real-world application of auditory models to hearing instrument design.
Stefan Launer · The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America · 2010
Auditory models provide a powerful tool for designing and developing signal processing algorithms of modern digital hearing instruments and can even be integrated directly into these algorithms. Models for loudness perception have been applied directly in hearing instrument algorithms with two applications: to control the gain of a hearing instrument and to limit the maximum output power of a hearing instrument as a “loudness limiter.” Another example is the application of a very simple model in a hearing instrument to help resolve localization problems due to the microphone position in BTE hearing instruments, resulting in reduced front/back confusions. Examples of the application of models to the development and analysis of hearing instrument performance in real-life environments include the use of auditory scene analysis models to better understand human sound source classification and to improve the performance of automatic control systems in hearing instruments. A last example is the application of models describing human localization performance under realistic acoustic environments to understand the impact that hearing instrument signal processing has on the ability of hearing impaired people to localize sounds with hearing instruments. This talk will explore and discuss the potential of these different approaches for hearing instrument technology.