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A simulation study of speech perception enhancement for cochlear implant patients using companding in noisy environment  

Lee Young-Woo (Dept. of Biomedical Engineering, Hanyang University)
Ji Yoon-Sang (Dept. of Biomedical Engineering, Hanyang University)
Lee Jong-Shil (Dept. of Biomedical Engineering, Hanyang University)
Kim In-Young (Dept. of Biomedical Engineering, Hanyang University)
Kim Sun-I. (Dept. of Biomedical Engineering, Hanyang University)
Hong Sung-Hwa (Dept. of Otolaryngology-Head and Neck Surgery, Sungkyunkwan University of Medicine)
Lee Sang-Min (School of Electrical Engineering, Inha University)
Publication Information
Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea SP / v.43, no.5, 2006 , pp. 79-87 More about this Journal
Abstract
In this study, we evaluated the performance of a companding strategy as a preprocessing for speech enhancement and noise reduction. The proposed algorithm is based on two tone suppression that is human's hearing characteristics. This algorithm enhances spectral peak of speech signal and reduces background noise, however it has tradeoff characteristics between speech distortion and noise reduction due to limited channel number and nonlinear block. Therefore, we designed two different companding structures that have relative characteristics of noise reduction and speech distortion and found suitable companding structures by difference of individual speech perception ability in noise environment. Thus we proposed speech perception enhancement of cochlear implant user in noise environment with low SNR. The performance of the proposed algorithm was evaluated through 5 normal hearing listeners using noise band simulation. Improvement of speech perception was observed for all subjects and each subject preferred the different type of companding structure.
Keywords
companding; noise reduction; cochlear implant; speech perception; noise band simulation;
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