OBJECTIVE The performance of an adaptive beam-former in a 2-microphone, behind-the-ear hearing aid for speech understanding in noisy environments was evaluated. Physical and perceptual evaluations were carried out. This was the first large-scale test of a wearable real-time implementation of this algorithm. The main perceptual research questions of this study were related to the influence on th...

in recent years, sub-band speech recognition has been found useful in addressing the need for robustness in speech recognition, especially for the speech contaminated by band-limited noise. in sub-band speech recognition, the full band speech is divided into several frequency sub-bands, with the result of the recognition task given by the combination of the sub-band feature vectors or their lik...

In the present study, speech intelligibility was evaluated in realistic, controlled conditions. “Critical sound scenarios” were defined as acoustic scenes that hearing aid users considered important, difficult, and common through ecological momentary assessment. These scenarios acquired real world using a spherical microphone array reproduced inside loudspeaker-based virtual environment (VSE) A...

The intelligibility of speech sysnthesis systems that are available nowadays is usually high enough to enable comparisons between different synthesis systems based on the speech quality. However, in some situations, like a civil aircraft cockpit, the acoustic environment may be such that intelligibility is a discriminating factor between systems. In this paper we propose a methodology for compa...

To scrutinize the binaural contribution to speech-in-noise reception, four groups of elderly participants with or without audiometric asymmetry <2 kHz and with or without near-normal binaural intelligibility level difference (BILD) completed tests of monaural and binaural phase sensitivity as well as cognitive function. Groups did not differ in age, overall degree of hearing loss, or cognitive ...

The Mel Frequency cepstral coefficients are the most widely used feature in speech recognition but they are very sensitive to noise. In this paper to achieve a satisfactorily performance in Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) applications we introduce a noise robust new set of MFCC vector estimated through following steps. First, spectral mean normalization is a pre-processing which applies to t...

In studies investigating binaural processing in human listeners, relatively long and task-dependent time constants of a binaural window ranging from 10 ms to 250 ms have been observed. Such time constants are often thought to reflect "binaural sluggishness." In this study, the effect of binaural sluggishness on binaural unmasking of speech in stationary speech-shaped noise is investigated in 10...