DEVELOPMENT AND EVALUATION OF SINGLE-MICROPHONE NOISE REDUCTION ALGORITHMS FOR DIGITAL HEARING AIDS

In this study single-microphone noise reduction procedures were investigated for use in digital hearing aids. One widely reported artifact of most noise suppression systems, the musical noise phenomenon, can partly be overcome by the Ephraim-Malah noise suppression algorithms [1,2]. Based on these algorithms, three different versions have been implemented together with a procedure for automatically updating the noise-spectrum estimate. To evaluate the algorithms, different tests have been performed with six normal-hearing and six hearing-impaired subjects. With ‘standard’ measurement methods no increase in speech intelligibility was found compared to the unprocessed signal. However, benefits with respect to reductions in listener fatigue and in the mental effort needed to listen to speech in noise over longer periods of time were found in this study by use of a newly developed ease-of-listening test. Subsequent paired comparison tests also revealed a clear preference of the hearing-impaired subjects for the noise-reduced signals in situations with rather stationary noise. In the case of strongly fluctuating noise at low SNR, however, the subjects preferred the unprocessed signal due to speech distortions caused by the noise reduction algorithms.