Journal of Biomedical Engineering Research (대한의용생체공학회:의공학회지)

The Korean Society of Medical and Biological Engineering (대한의용생체공학회)
권호 표지
DOI QR코드

DOI QR Code

Quantitative Evaluation of the Performance of Monaural FDSI Beamforming Algorithm using a KEMAR Mannequin

KEMAR 마네킹을 이용한 단이 보청기용 FDSI 빔포밍 알고리즘의 정량적 평가

  • Cho, Kyeongwon (Department of Biomedical Engineering, Hanyang University) ;
  • Nam, Kyoung Won (Department of Biomedical Engineering, Hanyang University) ;
  • Han, Jonghee (Bio & Health Lab, Samsung Advanced Institute of Technology) ;
  • Lee, Sangmin (Department of Electronic Engineering, Inha University) ;
  • Kim, Dongwook (Bio & Health Lab, Samsung Advanced Institute of Technology) ;
  • Hong, Sung Hwa (Department of Otorhinolaryngology-Head and Neck Surgery, Sungkyunkwan University) ;
  • Jang, Dong Pyo (Department of Biomedical Engineering, Hanyang University) ;
  • Kim, In Young (Department of Biomedical Engineering, Hanyang University)
  • 조경원 (한양대학교 의용생체공학과) ;
  • 남경원 (한양대학교 의용생체공학과) ;
  • 한종희 (삼성종합기술원 바이오헬스 연구실) ;
  • 이상민 (인하대학교 전자공학과) ;
  • 김동욱 (삼성종합기술원 바이오헬스 연구실) ;
  • 홍성화 (성균관대학교 의과대학 이비인후과교실) ;
  • 장동표 (한양대학교 의용생체공학과) ;
  • 김인영 (한양대학교 의용생체공학과)
  • Received : 2012.11.06
  • Accepted : 2013.01.21
  • Published : 2013.02.28
Download PDF
⟨ Previous Next ⟩

Abstract

To enhance the speech perception of hearing aid users in noisy environment, most hearing aid devices adopt various beamforming algorithms such as the first-order differential microphone (DM1) and the two-stage directional microphone (DM2) algorithms that maintain sounds from the direction of the interlocutor and reduce the ambient sounds from the other directions. However, these conventional algorithms represent poor directionality ability in low frequency area. Therefore, to enhance the speech perception of hearing aid uses in low frequency range, our group had suggested a fractional delay subtraction and integration (FDSI) algorithm and estimated its theoretical performance using computer simulation in previous article. In this study, we performed a KEMAR test in non-reverberant room that compares the performance of DM1, DM2, broadband beamforming (BBF), and proposed FDSI algorithms using several objective indices such as a signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) improvement, a segmental SNR (seg-SNR) improvement, a perceptual evaluation of speech quality (PESQ), and an Itakura-Saito measure (IS). Experimental results showed that the performance of the FDSI algorithm was -3.26-7.16 dB in SNR improvement, -1.94-5.41 dB in segSNR improvement, 1.49-2.79 in PESQ, and 0.79-3.59 in IS, which demonstrated that the FDSI algorithm showed the highest improvement of SNR and segSNR, and the lowest IS. We believe that the proposed FDSI algorithm has a potential as a beamformer for digital hearing aid devices.

Keywords

References

  1. H. Dillon, Hearing aids. Sydney: Boomerang Press, 2001.
  2. P.C. Loizou, Speech enhancement : theory and practice. Boca Raton: CRC Press, 2007.
  3. J.M. Kates, Digital hearing aids. San Diego: Plural Pub., 2008.
  4. W. Soede, F.A. Bilsen, and A.J. Berkhout, "Assessment of a directional microphone array for hearing-impaired listeners," The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, vol. 94, pp. 799-808, 1993. https://doi.org/10.1121/1.408181
  5. T. Ricketts and P. Henry, "Evaluation of an adaptive, directional-microphone hearing aid: Evaluacion de un auxiliar auditivo de microfono direccional adaptable," International Journal of Audiology, vol. 41, pp. 100-112, 2002. https://doi.org/10.3109/14992020209090400
  6. A. Schaub, Digital hearing aids. New York: Thieme, 2008.
  7. G.W. Elko and A.T.N. Pong, "A simple adaptive first-order differential microphone," 1995, pp. 169-172.
  8. F.L. Luo, J. Yang, C. Pavlovic, and A. Nehorai, "Adaptive null-forming scheme in digital hearing aids," Signal Processing, IEEE Transactions on, vol. 50, pp. 1583-1590, 2002. https://doi.org/10.1109/TSP.2002.1011199
  9. T. Ricketts and P. Henry, "Low-frequency gain compensation in directional hearing aids," American Journal of Audiology, vol. 11, pp. 29, 2002. https://doi.org/10.1044/1059-0889(2002/006)
  10. T.A. Ricketts, "How fitting, patient, and environmental factors affect directional benefit," The Hearing Journal, vol. 56, pp. 31, 2003.
  11. E. Mabande, A. Schad, and W. Kellermann, "Design of robust superdirective beamformers as a convex optimization problem," in Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing, 2009. ICASSP 2009. IEEE International Conference on, 2009, pp. 77-80.
  12. S. Doclo and M. Moonen, "Design of broadband beamformers robust against gain and phase errors in the microphone array characteristics," IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing, vol. 51, pp. 2511-2526, Oct 2003. https://doi.org/10.1109/TSP.2003.816885
  13. J. Han, Y.S. Ji, H. Kim, S.H. Yook, S. Lee, D. Kim, S.H. Hong, I.Y. Kim, and S.I. Kim, "New directional noise reduction method utilizing fractional cross-correlation for dual microphone DHA," in Proc. 41th KOSOMBE Conference, Chuncheon, Korea, May. 2010
  14. E. Rothauser, W. Chapman, N. Guttman, K. Nordby, H. Silbiger, G. Urbanek, and M. Weinstock, "IEEE recommended practice for speech quality measurements," IEEE Transactions on Audio Electroacoustics, vol. 17, pp. 227-246, 1969.
  15. M. Buchler, S. Allegro, S. Launer, and N. Dillier, "Sound classification in hearing aids inspired by auditory scene analysis," EURASIP Journal on Applied Signal Processing, vol. 2005, pp. 2991-3002, 2005. https://doi.org/10.1155/ASP.2005.2991
  16. P.C. Loizou, Speech enhancement : theory and practice. Boca Raton: CRC Press, 2007.