Speech Enhancement in Hearing Aids

In general, an uncontrolled environment may contain degradation components like background noise, speech from other speakers etc. along with required speech components. It is very tough to concentrate only on speech signals in presence of background noise for normal listeners and hearing impaired persons. The hearing organ is substantially sensitive to interfering noise. This interfering noise itself decreases speech quality and speech intelligibility which in turn causes speech communication troublesome. In many applications, the improved speech enhancement is achieved with beamformer using multiple microphones (microphone array).The aim of this thesis work is to find better beamforming technique which suits for hearing aid and also makes the hearing aid free from howling effect. The work investigates comparing of different beam forming techniques like Wiener, Maximum SNIR and Delay and Sum beamformer with Elko's Beamformer.

Autorentext

Ramesh Telagareddi completed his M.Sc in Signal Processing from Blekinge Institute of Technology, Sweden. Currently working on different beamforming techniques. His research interests are speech signal processing, microphone array processing, audio and acoustics, bio-medical signal processing.