Robust intelligibility and quality evaluation of combined temporal and spectral processing for hearing impaired

Abstract

• Combined temporal-spectral processing objectively evaluated in terms of HASQI and HASPI. • Six types of audiograms based on different slope and frequency losses are selected. • -5, -3, 0, 3, 5, 10 dB SNRs noisy environments in cafe, traffic, station and train are considered. • Proposed enhanced algorithm shows markable improvements in quality and intelligibility. Hearing-impaired people face numerous challenges with speech perception in the presence of interfering background noise. To suppress interfering background noise, the common approach widely used is speech enhancement. Inspired by the improved results of combined temporal and spectral processing in speech enhancement, this research study proposes temporal enhancement combined with two different spectral enhancement methods, with a novel approach of soft masking using priori and posterior signal to noise ratio uncertainty. The present study investigates quality and intelligibility objective evaluations, namely, hearing aid speech quality index and hearing aid speech perception index, of spectral and a combination of temporal-spectral speech enhancement methods for typical pattern of hearing loss characterized by six audiograms. For evaluation, clean speech files from the NOIZEUS database are mixed with four local noises, namely, cafeteria, traffic, station, and train at -5, -3, 0,3,5, and 10 dB SNRs. These local noises are quite common, which are encountered by people in their day-to-day lives. In most of the testing conditions, the new combined temporal spectral enhancement shows improved results in comparison with the purely spectral processing methods.