Hearing aid-controlled beamformer for binaural speech enhancement using a model-based approach

Mathew Shaji Kavalekalam; Jesper Kjær Nielsen; Mads Græsbøll Christensen; Jesper Boldt

doi:10.1109/ICASSP.2019.8683662

Hearing aid-controlled beamformer for binaural speech enhancement using a model-based approach

Mathew Shaji Kavalekalam, Jesper Kjær Nielsen, Mads Græsbøll Christensen, Jesper Boldt

Research output: Contribution to book/anthology/report/conference proceeding › Article in proceeding › Research › peer-review

3 Citations (Scopus)

304 Downloads (Pure)

Abstract

The understanding of speech from a particular speaker in the presence of other interfering speakers can be severely degraded for a hearing impaired person. Beamforming techniques have been proven to be effective to improve the speech understanding in such scenarios. However, the number of microphones in a hearing aid (HA) is limited due to the space and power constraints present in the HA. In this paper, we propose to use an external device e.g., a microphone array, that can communicate with the HA to overcome this limitation. We propose a method to control this external device based on the look direction of the HA user. We show, by means of simulations, the robustness of the proposed method at very low SNRs in a reverberant scenario. Moreover, we have also conducted experiments that show the benefit of using this framework for binaural and monaural enhancement.

Original language	English
Title of host publication	2019 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP)
Number of pages	5
Publisher	IEEE
Publication date	May 2019
Pages	321-325
ISBN (Electronic)	978-1-4799-8131-1
DOIs	https://doi.org/10.1109/ICASSP.2019.8683662
Publication status	Published - May 2019
Event	ICASSP 2019 - 2019 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP) - Brighton, United Kingdom, Duration: 12 May 2019 → 17 May 2019 https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/conhome/8671773/proceeding

Conference

Conference	ICASSP 2019 - 2019 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP)
Location	Brighton, United Kingdom,
Period	12/05/2019 → 17/05/2019
Internet address	https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/conhome/8671773/proceeding

Series	I E E E International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing. Proceedings
ISSN	1520-6149

Keywords

Speech enhancement
autoregressive models
beamforming

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10.1109/ICASSP.2019.8683662

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Kavalekalam, Mathew Shaji ; Nielsen, Jesper Kjær ; Christensen, Mads Græsbøll et al. / Hearing aid-controlled beamformer for binaural speech enhancement using a model-based approach. 2019 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP). IEEE, 2019. pp. 321-325 (I E E E International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing. Proceedings).

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title = "Hearing aid-controlled beamformer for binaural speech enhancement using a model-based approach",

abstract = "The understanding of speech from a particular speaker in the presence of other interfering speakers can be severely degraded for a hearing impaired person. Beamforming techniques have been proven to be effective to improve the speech understanding in such scenarios. However, the number of microphones in a hearing aid (HA) is limited due to the space and power constraints present in the HA. In this paper, we propose to use an external device e.g., a microphone array, that can communicate with the HA to overcome this limitation. We propose a method to control this external device based on the look direction of the HA user. We show, by means of simulations, the robustness of the proposed method at very low SNRs in a reverberant scenario. Moreover, we have also conducted experiments that show the benefit of using this framework for binaural and monaural enhancement. ",

keywords = "Speech enhancement, autoregressive models, beamforming",

author = "Kavalekalam, {Mathew Shaji} and Nielsen, {Jesper Kj{\ae}r} and Christensen, {Mads Gr{\ae}sb{\o}ll} and Jesper Boldt",

year = "2019",

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booktitle = "2019 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP)",

address = "United States",

note = "ICASSP 2019 - 2019 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP) ; Conference date: 12-05-2019 Through 17-05-2019",

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Kavalekalam, MS, Nielsen, JK, Christensen, MG & Boldt, J 2019, Hearing aid-controlled beamformer for binaural speech enhancement using a model-based approach. in 2019 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP). IEEE, I E E E International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing. Proceedings, pp. 321-325, ICASSP 2019 - 2019 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP), 12/05/2019. https://doi.org/10.1109/ICASSP.2019.8683662

Hearing aid-controlled beamformer for binaural speech enhancement using a model-based approach. / Kavalekalam, Mathew Shaji; Nielsen, Jesper Kjær; Christensen, Mads Græsbøll et al.
2019 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP). IEEE, 2019. p. 321-325 (I E E E International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing. Proceedings).

Research output: Contribution to book/anthology/report/conference proceeding › Article in proceeding › Research › peer-review

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Kavalekalam MS, Nielsen JK, Christensen MG, Boldt J. Hearing aid-controlled beamformer for binaural speech enhancement using a model-based approach. In 2019 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP). IEEE. 2019. p. 321-325. (I E E E International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing. Proceedings). doi: 10.1109/ICASSP.2019.8683662

Hearing aid-controlled beamformer for binaural speech enhancement using a model-based approach

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