One of the main complaints of hearing aid users is their degraded speech understanding in noisy environments. Modern hearing aids therefore include noise reduction techniques. These techniques are typically designed for a monaural application, i.e. in a single device. However, the majority of hearing aid users currently have hearing aids at both ears in a so-called bilateral fitting, as it is widely accepted that this leads to a better speech understanding and user satisfaction. Unfortunately, the independent signal processing (in particular the noise reduction) in a bilateral fitting can destroy the so-called binaural cues, namely the interaural time and level differences (ITDs and ILDs) which are used to localize sound sources in the horizontal plane. A recent technological advance are so-called binaural hearing aids, where a wireless link allows for the exchange of data (or even microphone signals) between the ...

Hearing aid users experience great difficulty in understanding speech in noisy environments. This has led to the introduction of noise reduction algorithms in hearing aids. The development of these algorithms is typically done monaurally. However, the human auditory system is a binaural system, which compares and combines the signals received by both ears to perceive a sound source as a single entity in space. Providing two monaural, independently operating, noise reduction systems, i.e. a bilateral configuration, to the hearing aid user may disrupt binaural information, needed to localize sound sources correctly and to improve speech perception in noise. In this research project, we first examined the influence of commercially available, bilateral, noise reduction algorithms on binaural hearing. Extensive objective and perceptual evaluations showed that the bilateral adaptive directional microphone (ADM) and the bilateral fixed directional microphone, two of the most ...

In the world of Information and communications technology (ICT), strategies for innovation and development are increasingly focusing on applications that require spatial representation and real-time interaction with and within 3D-media environments. One of the major challenges that such applications have to address is user-centricity, reflecting e.g. on developing complexity-hiding services so that people can personalize their own delivery of services. In these terms, multimodal interfaces represent a key factor for enabling an inclusive use of new technologies by everyone. In order to achieve this, multimodal realistic models that describe our environment are needed, and in particular models that accurately describe the acoustics of the environment and communication through the auditory modality are required. Examples of currently active research directions and application areas include 3DTV and future internet, 3D visual-sound scene coding, transmission and reconstruction and teleconferencing systems, to name but ...

Reverberation is the sum of reflected sound waves and is present in any conventional room. Speech communication devices such as mobile phones in hands-free mode, tablets, smart TVs, teleconferencing systems, hearing aids, voice-controlled systems, etc. use one or more microphones to pick up the desired speech signals. When the microphones are not in the proximity of the desired source, strong reverberation and noise can degrade the signal quality at the microphones and can impair the intelligibility and the performance of automatic speech recognizers. Therefore, it is a highly demanded task to process the microphone signals such that reverberation and noise are reduced. The process of reducing or removing reverberation from recorded signals is called dereverberation. As dereverberation is usually a completely blind problem, where the only available information are the microphone signals, and as the acoustic scenario can be non-stationary, ...

Never before has speech been captured as often by electronic devices equipped with one or multiple microphones, serving a variety of applications. It is the key aspect in digital telephony, hearing devices, and voice-driven human-to-machine interaction. When speech is recorded, the microphones also capture a variety of further, undesired sound components due to adverse acoustic conditions. Interfering speech, background noise and reverberation, i.e. the persistence of sound in a room after excitation caused by a multitude of reflections on the room enclosure, are detrimental to the quality and intelligibility of target speech as well as the performance of automatic speech recognition. Hence, speech enhancement aiming at estimating the early target-speech component, which contains the direct component and early reflections, is crucial to nearly all speech-related applications presently available. In this thesis, we compare, propose and evaluate existing and novel approaches ...

Cochlear implants (CI) are surgically implanted hearing aids that provide auditory sensations to deaf people through direct electrical stimulation of the auditory nerve. Although relatively good speech understanding can be achieved by implanted subjects, pitch perception by CI subjects is about 50 times worse than observed for normal-hearing (NH) persons. Pitch is, however, important for intonation, music, speech understanding in tonal languages, and for separating multiple simultaneous sound sources. The major goal of this work is to improve pitch perception by CI subjects. In CI subjects two fundamental mechanisms are used for pitch perception: place pitch and temporal pitch. Our results show that place pitch is correlated to the sound¢s brightness because place pitch sensation is related to the centroid of the excitation pattern along the cochlea. The slopes of the excitation pattern determine place pitch sensitivity. Our results also ...

Identifying the target speaker in hearing aid applications is an essential ingredient to improve speech intelligibility. Although several speech enhancement algorithms are available to reduce background noise or to perform source separation in multi-speaker scenarios, their performance depends on correctly identifying the target speaker to be enhanced. Recent advances in electroencephalography (EEG) have shown that it is possible to identify the target speaker which the listener is attending to using single-trial EEG-based auditory attention decoding (AAD) methods. However, in realistic acoustic environments the AAD performance is influenced by undesired disturbances such as interfering speakers, noise and reverberation. In addition, it is important for real-world hearing aid applications to close the AAD loop by presenting on-line auditory feedback. This thesis deals with the problem of identifying and enhancing the target speaker in realistic acoustic environments based on decoding the auditory attention ...

This thesis presents a new approach to the problem of localizing and tracking multiple acoustic sources using a microphone array. The use of microphone arrays offers enhancements of speech signals recorded in meeting rooms and office spaces. A common solution for speech enhancement in realistic environments with ambient noise and multi-path propagation is the application of so-called beamforming techniques, that enhance signals at the desired angle, using constructive interference, while attenuating signals coming from other directions, by destructive interference. Such beamforming algorithms require as prior knowledge the source location. Therefore, source localization and tracking algorithms are an integral part of such a system. However, conventional localization algorithms deteriorate in realistic scenarios with multiple concurrent speakers. In contrast to conventional localization algorithms, the localization algorithm presented in this thesis makes use of fundamental frequency or pitch information of speech signals in ...

This thesis presents a new approach to the problem of localizing and tracking multiple acoustic sources using a microphone array. The use of microphone arrays offers enhancements of speech signals recorded in meeting rooms and office spaces. A common solution for speech enhancement in realistic environments with ambient noise and multi-path propagation is the application of so-called beamforming techniques, that enhance signals at the desired angle, using constructive interference, while attenuating signals coming from other directions, by destructive interference. Such beamforming algorithms require as prior knowledge the source location. Therefore, source localization and tracking algorithms are an integral part of such a system. However, conventional localization algorithms deteriorate in realistic scenarios with multiple concurrent speakers. In contrast to conventional localization algorithms, the localization algorithm presented in this thesis makes use of fundamental frequency or pitch information of speech signals in ...

Due to their decreased ability to understand speech hearing impaired may have difficulties to interact in social groups, especially when several people are talking simultaneously. Fortunately, in the last decades hearing aids have evolved from simple sound amplifiers to modern digital devices with complex functionalities including noise reduction algorithms, which are crucial to improve speech understanding in background noise for hearing-impaired persons. Since many hearing aid users are fitted with two hearing aids, so-called binaural hearing aids have been developed, which exchange data and signals through a wireless link such that the processing in both hearing aids can be synchronized. In addition to reducing noise and limiting speech distortion, another important objective of noise reduction algorithms in binaural hearing aids is the preservation of the listener’s impression of the acoustical scene, in order to exploit the binaural hearing advantage and ...

Music is built from sound, ultimately resulting from an elaborate interaction between the sound-generating properties of physical objects (i.e. music instruments) and the sound perception abilities of the human auditory system. Humans, even without any kind of formal music training, are typically able to ex- tract, almost unconsciously, a great amount of relevant information from a musical signal. Features such as the beat of a musical piece, the main melody of a complex musical ar- rangement, the sound sources and events occurring in a complex musical mixture, the song structure (e.g. verse, chorus, bridge) and the musical genre of a piece, are just some examples of the level of knowledge that a naive listener is commonly able to extract just from listening to a musical piece. In order to do so, the human auditory system uses a variety of cues ...

Sound source localization algorithms have a long research history in the field of digital signal processing. Many common applications like intelligent personal assistants, teleconferencing systems and methods for technical diagnosis in acoustics require an accurate localization of sound sources in the environment. However, dynamic environments entail a particular challenge for these systems. For instance, voice controlled smart home applications, where the speaker, as well as potential noise sources, are moving within the room, are a typical example of dynamic environments. Classical sound source localization systems only have limited capabilities to deal with dynamic acoustic scenarios. In this thesis, three novel approaches to sound source localization that extend existing classical methods will be presented. The first system is proposed in the context of audiovisual source localization. Determining the position of sound sources in adverse acoustic conditions can be improved by including ...

This thesis presents methods to enhance the speech of patients with voice disorders or with substitution voices. The first method enhances speech of patients with laryngeal neoplasm. The enhancement enables a reduction of pitch and a strengthening of the harmonics of voiced segments as well as decreasing the perceived speaking effort. The need for reliable pitch mark determination on disordered and substitution voices led to the implementation of a state-space based algorithm. Its performance is comparable to a state-of-the art pitch detection algorithm but does not require post processing. A subsequent part of the thesis deals with alaryngeal speech, with a focus on Electro-Larynx (EL) speech. After investigating an EL speech production model, which takes into account the common source of the speech signal and the directly radiated EL (DREL) sound, a solution to suppress the direct sound is based ...

The improvement of speech intelligibility is a traditional problem which still remains open and unsolved. The recent boom of applications such as hands-free communi- cations or automatic speech recognition systems and the ever-increasing demands of the hearing-impaired community have given a definitive impulse to the research in this area. This PhD thesis is focused on speech enhancement for audiological applications. Most of the research conducted in this thesis has been focused on the improvement of speech intelligibility in hearing aids, considering the variety of restrictions and limitations imposed by this type of devices. The combination of source separation techniques and spatial filtering with machine learning and evolutionary computation has originated novel and interesting algorithms which are included in this thesis. The thesis is divided in two main parts. The first one contains a preliminary study of the problem and a ...

Localization, separation and tracking of acoustic sources are ancient challenges that lots of animals and human beings are doing intuitively and sometimes with an impressive accuracy. Artificial methods have been developed for various applications and conditions. The majority of those methods are centralized, meaning that all signals are processed together to produce the estimation results. The concept of distributed sensor networks is becoming more realistic as technology advances in the fields of nano-technology, micro electro-mechanic systems (MEMS) and communication. A distributed sensor network comprises scattered nodes which are autonomous, self-powered modules consisting of sensors, actuators and communication capabilities. A variety of layout and connectivity graphs are usually used. Distributed sensor networks have a broad range of applications, which can be categorized in ecology, military, environment monitoring, medical, security and surveillance. In this dissertation we develop algorithms for distributed sensor networks ...