Noise suppression and speech enhancement for hearing aid applications using smartphones

In our hearing aid research supported by NIH-NIDCD, smartphone is used as a powerful platform to implement complex signal processing algorithms for facilitating hearing study and improving hearing aid applications. As part of the hearing aid signal processing pipeline is speech enhancement (SE) algorithm aimed at suppressing the noise and enhancing the speech. In this paper, we present a review of some new single- and two-channel SE algorithms developed for operating under different types of noise and different signal to noise ratios. These algorithms aim at improving the quality (noise suppression) and intelligibility (perception) of enhanced speech for hearing aid applications through their real-time implementations on smartphones. Performance of these algorithms are presented and compared using various objective and subjective tests.

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