NEAR END LISTENING ENHANCEMENT WITH STRICT LOUDSPEAKER OUTPUT POWER CONSTRAINING
Bastian Sauert, Gerald Enzner, Peter Vary · 2006
The concept of near end listening enhancement has recently been proposed for improving the speech intelligibility of telecommu-nication equipment in the presence of ambient noise. Near end listening enhancement is a signal processing framework that acts on the received signal from the far end speaker to reduce the listening effort of the near end speaker. Since it is often not ac-ceptable/possible to increase the emitted loudspeaker power, this paper investigates the opportunities of listening enhancement un-der the constraint that the processed loudspeaker signal power is strictly equal to the power of the received signal. We will com-pare two reasonable processing strategies: a previous one that aims at the amplification of speech at noisy frequencies and a new one which cuts down the speech power at noisy frequencies. The results show that a considerable improvement of speech in-telligibility can be achieved by the second approach which can be understood by a simple model of human hearing. 1.