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http://dx.doi.org/10.9718/JBER.2013.34.1.24

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

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)
Publication Information
Journal of Biomedical Engineering Research / v.34, no.1, 2013 , pp. 24-33 More about this Journal
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
hearing aids; directional microphone; beamforming;
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