Speech analysis for hearing impaired using chirped wavelets

Wavelet techniques are utilized to process speech signals for the hearing impaired. We are interested in schemes that isolate and enhance short duration, broadband speech elements (such as unvoiced consonants) while still capturing narrowband speech components. Discerning unvoiced consonants presents an obstacle for hearing impaired persons. A dyadic scheme is proposed, using chirped wavelets, to seize the characteristics of broadband speech elements. The method is tested on speech data, in noise free and noisy conditions, and compared with sinusoidal based wavelets. Results demonstrate that chirped wavelets are useful in the analysis and enhancement of speech for the hearing impaired.

[1]  O. Rioul,et al.  Wavelets and signal processing , 1991, IEEE Signal Processing Magazine.

[2]  S. Qian,et al.  Joint time-frequency analysis : methods and applications , 1996 .

[3]  Henrique S. Malvar.  A modulated complex lapped transform and its applications to audio processing , 1999, 1999 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing. Proceedings. ICASSP99 (Cat. No.99CH36258).

[4]  A.B. Doser,et al.  Time/frequency techniques for signal feature detection , 1999, Conference Record of the Thirty-Third Asilomar Conference on Signals, Systems, and Computers (Cat. No.CH37020).

[5]  S. Boll,et al.  Suppression of acoustic noise in speech using spectral subtraction , 1979 .

[6]  Philipos C. Loizou,et al.  Mimicking the human ear , 1998, IEEE Signal Process. Mag..

[7]  A.B. Doser.  A new time/frequency technique for detecting chirped signals , 1998, Conference Record of Thirty-Second Asilomar Conference on Signals, Systems and Computers (Cat. No.98CH36284).

[8]  A.B. Doser,et al.  Transionospheric signal detection with chirped wavelets , 1997, Conference Record of the Thirty-First Asilomar Conference on Signals, Systems and Computers (Cat. No.97CB36136).

[9]  Simon Haykin,et al.  The chirplet transform: physical considerations , 1995, IEEE Trans. Signal Process..