An Improved Noise Reduction Technique for Enhancing the Intelligibility of Sinewave Vocoded Speech: Implication in Cochlear Implants
A cochlear implant (CI) is the most suitable option for individuals with severe profound hearing loss. CI restores the audibility to near perfection and offers good speech understanding in quiet. However, the speech perception in noise with CIs is less optimal as most speech coding strategies of CIs...
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| Format: | Article |
| Language: | English |
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IEEE
2023-01-01
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| Series: | IEEE Access |
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| Online Access: | https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9999416/ |
| _version_ | 1797955494505086976 |
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| author | Venkateswarlu Poluboina Aparna Pulikala Arivudai Nambi Pitchai Muthu |
| author_facet | Venkateswarlu Poluboina Aparna Pulikala Arivudai Nambi Pitchai Muthu |
| author_sort | Venkateswarlu Poluboina |
| collection | DOAJ |
| description | A cochlear implant (CI) is the most suitable option for individuals with severe profound hearing loss. CI restores the audibility to near perfection and offers good speech understanding in quiet. However, the speech perception in noise with CIs is less optimal as most speech coding strategies of CIs encode only the temporal envelope. Besides the current CI signal coding strategies lacks sophisticated pre-processing. In the current study, we proposed a novel pre-processing method to improve speech Intelligibility in noise and tested using the acoustic simulations of cochlear implants. The proposed noise reduction technique aims to minimize the mean square error (MSE) between the temporal envelopes of the enhanced speech and its clean speech. Therefore, the proposed method will be suitable for CI applications. This paper provides an analysis of the theoretical derivation of the noise suppression function and also the performance evaluation using objective and subjective tests. The effectiveness of the proposed method was objectively evaluated using the SRMR-CI and ESTOI. Additionally, speech recognition through the acoustic simulations of the cochlear implant was done for the subjective evaluation. Performance of the proposed method was compared with the Weiner filter (WF) and sigmoidal functions. The sinewave vocoder was used to simulate the cochlear implant perception. Both objective and subjective scores revealed that the performance of the proposed technique is superior to the WF and sigmoidal function. |
| first_indexed | 2024-04-10T23:35:02Z |
| format | Article |
| id | doaj.art-72eb7f5fa159456d9cdca2ee40e8a73f |
| institution | Directory Open Access Journal |
| issn | 2169-3536 |
| language | English |
| last_indexed | 2024-04-10T23:35:02Z |
| publishDate | 2023-01-01 |
| publisher | IEEE |
| record_format | Article |
| series | IEEE Access |
| spelling | doaj.art-72eb7f5fa159456d9cdca2ee40e8a73f2023-01-12T00:00:14ZengIEEEIEEE Access2169-35362023-01-011178779610.1109/ACCESS.2022.32325499999416An Improved Noise Reduction Technique for Enhancing the Intelligibility of Sinewave Vocoded Speech: Implication in Cochlear ImplantsVenkateswarlu Poluboina0https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2366-1752Aparna Pulikala1Arivudai Nambi Pitchai Muthu2Department of Electronics and Communication Engineering, National Institute of Technology Karnataka, Surathkal, Mangaluru, IndiaDepartment of Electronics and Communication Engineering, National Institute of Technology Karnataka, Surathkal, Mangaluru, IndiaDepartment of Audiology and Speech Language Pathology, Kasturba Medical College, Mangaluru, IndiaA cochlear implant (CI) is the most suitable option for individuals with severe profound hearing loss. CI restores the audibility to near perfection and offers good speech understanding in quiet. However, the speech perception in noise with CIs is less optimal as most speech coding strategies of CIs encode only the temporal envelope. Besides the current CI signal coding strategies lacks sophisticated pre-processing. In the current study, we proposed a novel pre-processing method to improve speech Intelligibility in noise and tested using the acoustic simulations of cochlear implants. The proposed noise reduction technique aims to minimize the mean square error (MSE) between the temporal envelopes of the enhanced speech and its clean speech. Therefore, the proposed method will be suitable for CI applications. This paper provides an analysis of the theoretical derivation of the noise suppression function and also the performance evaluation using objective and subjective tests. The effectiveness of the proposed method was objectively evaluated using the SRMR-CI and ESTOI. Additionally, speech recognition through the acoustic simulations of the cochlear implant was done for the subjective evaluation. Performance of the proposed method was compared with the Weiner filter (WF) and sigmoidal functions. The sinewave vocoder was used to simulate the cochlear implant perception. Both objective and subjective scores revealed that the performance of the proposed technique is superior to the WF and sigmoidal function.https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9999416/Noise reductionspeech recognitioncochlear implantvocoder simulation |
| spellingShingle | Venkateswarlu Poluboina Aparna Pulikala Arivudai Nambi Pitchai Muthu An Improved Noise Reduction Technique for Enhancing the Intelligibility of Sinewave Vocoded Speech: Implication in Cochlear Implants IEEE Access Noise reduction speech recognition cochlear implant vocoder simulation |
| title | An Improved Noise Reduction Technique for Enhancing the Intelligibility of Sinewave Vocoded Speech: Implication in Cochlear Implants |
| title_full | An Improved Noise Reduction Technique for Enhancing the Intelligibility of Sinewave Vocoded Speech: Implication in Cochlear Implants |
| title_fullStr | An Improved Noise Reduction Technique for Enhancing the Intelligibility of Sinewave Vocoded Speech: Implication in Cochlear Implants |
| title_full_unstemmed | An Improved Noise Reduction Technique for Enhancing the Intelligibility of Sinewave Vocoded Speech: Implication in Cochlear Implants |
| title_short | An Improved Noise Reduction Technique for Enhancing the Intelligibility of Sinewave Vocoded Speech: Implication in Cochlear Implants |
| title_sort | improved noise reduction technique for enhancing the intelligibility of sinewave vocoded speech implication in cochlear implants |
| topic | Noise reduction speech recognition cochlear implant vocoder simulation |
| url | https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9999416/ |
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