This paper evaluated psychophysically an ultra-low-power, analog biomimetic cochlear-implant (CI) processor filterbank architecture, which was recently proposed and demonstrated in hardware. The architecture/strategy emulates the lateral inhibition (LI) mechanism by employing an automatic gain control (AGC) scheme that is coupled across One-Zero-Gammatone-Filter (OZGF) channels. The OZGF filtering and the coupled channel AGC were tested respectively in two experiments, where normal-hearing listeners were required to listen to sentences and recognise key words therein. The sentences were mixed with a steady background noise at signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs) of $-$ 6, $-$ 3 and 0 dB, and processed through a noise-excited envelope vocoder serving as the acoustic simulator of cochlear implants. In the first experiment, the OZGF filtering was compared with cascaded bandpass biquad filtering employed in recent attempts towards fully-implantable CI processing, in terms of the resulting intelligibility. The results showed that the sharply tuned OZGF response did not degrade intelligibility despite the very limited number (16) of channels used. In the second experiment, the sentences were processed in two multi-channel compression systems, one with the channel AGC coupled, whilst another uncoupled. The results showed that the AGC-coupled system was significantly advantageous, and the improvement averaged across the SNRs is 31 percentage points. Furthermore, this compressive system results in no significant decrease in intelligibility when compared to the linear filtering systems investigated in the first experiment. Thus, the coupled channel AGC may be considered as a potential solution to the limited spectral contrast of current CI systems, which may partially account for their noise-susceptibility.
Read full abstract