Shankar Nikhil, Kucuk Abdullah, Reddy Chandan K A, Bhat Gautam S, Panahi Issa M S
Annu Int Conf IEEE Eng Med Biol Soc. 2018 Jul;2018:417-420. doi: 10.1109/EMBC.2018.8512369.
This paper presents the minimum variance distortionless response (MVDR) beamformer combined with a Speech Enhancement (SE) gain function as a real-time application running on smartphones that work as an assistive device to Hearing Aids. It has been shown that beamforming techniques improve the Signal to Noise Ratio (SNR) in noisy conditions. In the proposed algorithm, MVDR beamformer is used as an SNR booster for the SE method. The proposed SE gain is based on the Log-Spectral Amplitude estimator to improve the speech quality in the presence of different background noises. Objective evaluation and intelligibility measures support the theoretical analysis and show significant improvements of the proposed method in comparison with existing methods. Subjective test results show the effectiveness of the application in real-world noisy conditions at SNR levels of -5 dB, 0 dB, and 5 dB.
本文介绍了一种结合语音增强（SE）增益函数的最小方差无失真响应（MVDR）波束形成器，它作为一种在智能手机上运行的实时应用程序，可作为助听器的辅助设备。研究表明，波束形成技术在嘈杂环境中可提高信噪比（SNR）。在所提出的算法中，MVDR波束形成器用作SE方法的SNR增强器。所提出的SE增益基于对数谱幅度估计器，以在存在不同背景噪声的情况下提高语音质量。客观评估和可懂度测量支持理论分析，并表明与现有方法相比，所提出的方法有显著改进。主观测试结果表明，该应用在-5 dB、0 dB和5 dB的SNR水平下，在现实世界嘈杂环境中是有效的。
