Evaluation of an ERB frequency scale noise reduction for hearing aids: A comparative study

Among speech enhancement methods, the Ephraim and Malah suppression rule (EMSR) has proven to be efficient in reducing the background noise while preventing from a common artefact: the musical noise. From psychoacoustic motivation, an implementation of the EMSR with a perceptually relevant frequency partition is proposed. This implementation is based on non-uniform oversampled filter-banks. The frequency resolution is nevertheless uniform on the equivalent rectangular bandwidth (ERB)-scale. Objective and subjective comparison with classical EMSR and uniform critically decimated filter-banks implementations has been achieved.

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