Wearable Hearing Device Spectral Enhancement Driven by Non-Negative Sparse Coding-Based Residual Noise Reduction

This paper proposes a novel technique to improve a spectral statistical filter for speech enhancement, to be applied in wearable hearing devices such as hearing aids. The proposed method is implemented considering a 32-channel uniform polyphase discrete Fourier transform filter bank, for which the o...

Full description

Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Seon Man Kim
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: MDPI AG 2020-10-01
Series:Sensors
Subjects:
Online Access:https://www.mdpi.com/1424-8220/20/20/5751
_version_ 1797551438543454208
author Seon Man Kim
author_facet Seon Man Kim
author_sort Seon Man Kim
collection DOAJ
description This paper proposes a novel technique to improve a spectral statistical filter for speech enhancement, to be applied in wearable hearing devices such as hearing aids. The proposed method is implemented considering a 32-channel uniform polyphase discrete Fourier transform filter bank, for which the overall algorithm processing delay is 8 ms in accordance with the hearing device requirements. The proposed speech enhancement technique, which exploits the concepts of both non-negative sparse coding (NNSC) and spectral statistical filtering, provides an online unified framework to overcome the problem of residual noise in spectral statistical filters under noisy environments. First, the spectral gain attenuator of the statistical Wiener filter is obtained using the a priori signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) estimated through a decision-directed approach. Next, the spectrum estimated using the Wiener spectral gain attenuator is decomposed by applying the NNSC technique to the target speech and residual noise components. These components are used to develop an NNSC-based Wiener spectral gain attenuator to achieve enhanced speech. The performance of the proposed NNSC–Wiener filter was evaluated through a perceptual evaluation of the speech quality scores under various noise conditions with SNRs ranging from -5 to 20 dB. The results indicated that the proposed NNSC–Wiener filter can outperform the conventional Wiener filter and NNSC-based speech enhancement methods at all SNRs.
first_indexed 2024-03-10T15:44:44Z
format Article
id doaj.art-c881c73b7a4e461e92db7a0eb4042950
institution Directory Open Access Journal
issn 1424-8220
language English
last_indexed 2024-03-10T15:44:44Z
publishDate 2020-10-01
publisher MDPI AG
record_format Article
series Sensors
spelling doaj.art-c881c73b7a4e461e92db7a0eb40429502023-11-20T16:33:49ZengMDPI AGSensors1424-82202020-10-012020575110.3390/s20205751Wearable Hearing Device Spectral Enhancement Driven by Non-Negative Sparse Coding-Based Residual Noise ReductionSeon Man Kim0Korea Photonics Technology Institute, Gwangju 61007, KoreaThis paper proposes a novel technique to improve a spectral statistical filter for speech enhancement, to be applied in wearable hearing devices such as hearing aids. The proposed method is implemented considering a 32-channel uniform polyphase discrete Fourier transform filter bank, for which the overall algorithm processing delay is 8 ms in accordance with the hearing device requirements. The proposed speech enhancement technique, which exploits the concepts of both non-negative sparse coding (NNSC) and spectral statistical filtering, provides an online unified framework to overcome the problem of residual noise in spectral statistical filters under noisy environments. First, the spectral gain attenuator of the statistical Wiener filter is obtained using the a priori signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) estimated through a decision-directed approach. Next, the spectrum estimated using the Wiener spectral gain attenuator is decomposed by applying the NNSC technique to the target speech and residual noise components. These components are used to develop an NNSC-based Wiener spectral gain attenuator to achieve enhanced speech. The performance of the proposed NNSC–Wiener filter was evaluated through a perceptual evaluation of the speech quality scores under various noise conditions with SNRs ranging from -5 to 20 dB. The results indicated that the proposed NNSC–Wiener filter can outperform the conventional Wiener filter and NNSC-based speech enhancement methods at all SNRs.https://www.mdpi.com/1424-8220/20/20/5751hearing devicehearing aidspeech enhancementWiener filterresidual noisenon-negative sparse coding
spellingShingle Seon Man Kim
Wearable Hearing Device Spectral Enhancement Driven by Non-Negative Sparse Coding-Based Residual Noise Reduction
Sensors
hearing device
hearing aid
speech enhancement
Wiener filter
residual noise
non-negative sparse coding
title Wearable Hearing Device Spectral Enhancement Driven by Non-Negative Sparse Coding-Based Residual Noise Reduction
title_full Wearable Hearing Device Spectral Enhancement Driven by Non-Negative Sparse Coding-Based Residual Noise Reduction
title_fullStr Wearable Hearing Device Spectral Enhancement Driven by Non-Negative Sparse Coding-Based Residual Noise Reduction
title_full_unstemmed Wearable Hearing Device Spectral Enhancement Driven by Non-Negative Sparse Coding-Based Residual Noise Reduction
title_short Wearable Hearing Device Spectral Enhancement Driven by Non-Negative Sparse Coding-Based Residual Noise Reduction
title_sort wearable hearing device spectral enhancement driven by non negative sparse coding based residual noise reduction
topic hearing device
hearing aid
speech enhancement
Wiener filter
residual noise
non-negative sparse coding
url https://www.mdpi.com/1424-8220/20/20/5751
work_keys_str_mv AT seonmankim wearablehearingdevicespectralenhancementdrivenbynonnegativesparsecodingbasedresidualnoisereduction