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http://dx.doi.org/10.9718/JBER.2013.34.1.8

Real Time Environmental Classification Algorithm Using Neural Network for Hearing Aids  

Seo, Sangwan (Department of Biomedical Engineering, Hanyang University)
Yook, Sunhyun (Department of Biomedical Engineering, Hanyang University)
Nam, Kyoung Won (Department of Biomedical Engineering, Hanyang University)
Han, Jonghee (Department of Biomedical Engineering, Hanyang University)
Kwon, See Youn (Department of Otolaryngology-Head and Neck Surgery, Samsung Medical Center)
Hong, Sung Hwa (Department of Otolaryngology-Head and Neck Surgery, Samsung Medical Center)
Kim, Dongwook (Bio and Health Lab, Samsung Advanced Institute of Technology)
Lee, Sangmin (Department of Electronic Engineering, Inha 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. 8-13 More about this Journal
Abstract
Persons with sensorineural hearing impairment have troubles in hearing at noisy environments because of their deteriorated hearing levels and low-spectral resolution of the auditory system and therefore, they use hearing aids to compensate weakened hearing abilities. Various algorithms for hearing loss compensation and environmental noise reduction have been implemented in the hearing aid; however, the performance of these algorithms vary in accordance with external sound situations and therefore, it is important to tune the operation of the hearing aid appropriately in accordance with a wide variety of sound situations. In this study, a sound classification algorithm that can be applied to the hearing aid was suggested. The proposed algorithm can classify the different types of speech situations into four categories: 1) speech-only, 2) noise-only, 3) speech-in-noise, and 4) music-only. The proposed classification algorithm consists of two sub-parts: a feature extractor and a speech situation classifier. The former extracts seven characteristic features - short time energy and zero crossing rate in the time domain; spectral centroid, spectral flux and spectral roll-off in the frequency domain; mel frequency cepstral coefficients and power values of mel bands - from the recent input signals of two microphones, and the latter classifies the current speech situation. The experimental results showed that the proposed algorithm could classify the kinds of speech situations with an accuracy of over 94.4%. Based on these results, we believe that the proposed algorithm can be applied to the hearing aid to improve speech intelligibility in noisy environments.
Keywords
hearing aids; classification; artificial neural network; hearing impaired;
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