In this paper we present recent results on the development of the SynFace lip synchronized talking head towards multilinguality, varying signal conditions and noise robustness in the Hearing at Home project. We then describe the large scale hearing impaired user studies carried out for three languages. The user tests focus on measuring the gain in Speech Reception Threshold in Noise when using ...

Amplitude modulation (AM) and frequency modulation (FM) are commonly used in communication, but their relative contributions to speech recognition have not been fully explored. To bridge this gap, we derived slowly varying AM and FM from speech sounds and conducted listening tests using stimuli with different modulations in normal-hearing and cochlear-implant subjects. We found that although AM...

Background noise reduces the depth of the low-frequency envelope modulations known to be important for speech intelligibility. The relative strength of the target and masker envelope modulations can be quantified using a modulation signal-to-noise ratio, (S/N)(mod), measure. Such a measure can be used in noise-suppression algorithms to extract target-relevant modulations from the corrupted (tar...

Dealing with environmental noises presents a major issue for cochlear implant (CI) users. Hence, digital noise reduction (DNR) schemes have become important features of CI systems. Many noises like for example clinking glasses or slamming doors, have impulsive onsets and decay quickly. Common DNR algorithms cannot handle this type of noise in an appropriate way. In this study, we investigated t...

OBJECTIVE The objectives of the investigation were to evaluate the effect of a sound processor upgrade on the speech reception threshold in noise and to collect long-term safety and efficacy data after 2½ to 5 years of device use of direct acoustic cochlear implant (DACI) recipients. STUDY DESIGN The study was designed as a mono-centric, prospective clinical trial. SETTING Tertiary referral...

OBJECTIVE To evaluate the improvement in speech intelligibility in noise obtained with an assistive real-time fixed endfire array of bidirectional microphones in comparison with an omnidirectional hearing aid microphone in a realistic environment. DESIGN The microphone array was evaluated physically in anechoic and reverberant conditions. Perceptual tests of speech intelligibility in noise we...

in this paper, genetic programming is applied for quality improvement of noisy speech signal. therefore, a system including both spectral subtraction and genetic programming is implemented for speech enhancement. in the proposed method, first noise is reduced by spectral subtraction. in the next step, genetic programming trees are trained for more enhancement of noisy signal by mapping the sign...