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Project Description

It is well known that normal hearing listeners can better understand speech in noise when listening with two ears rather than with only one. Differences between the signals at the two ears allow the speech and noise to be separated based on their spatial locations resulting in improved intelligibility. It is the goal of this project to exploit these binaural advantages by developing speech enhancement algorithms that jointly enhance the speech received by the two ears. [ more information ]

Objectives

The project aims:

1. To extend existing single-channel intelligibility metrics to encompass binaural listening with both normal-hearing and impaired-hearing listeners.
2. To develop methods for the blind adaptive estimation of acoustic parameters that characterise the listening environment and context.
3. To develop methods to estimate binaural time-frequency masks that improve the intelligibility of speech-in-noise for hearing-impaired listeners without unacceptably degrading quality.
4. To develop methods that automatically modify the enhancement regime of a hearing aid dynamically in response to the listening environment and context.

Imperial College London

• Mr Mike Brookes (principal investigator) is a Reader in Signal Processing in Dept of Electrical and Electronic Engineering.
• Dr Patrick Naylor (co-investigator) is a Reader in the Communication and Signal Processing Group in the Dept. of Electrical and Electronic Engineering.
• Dr Alastair Moore (researcher) is a Research Associate in the Dept. of Electrical and Electronic Engineering.
• Dr Wei Xue (researcher) was a Research Associate in the Dept. of Electrical and Electronic Engineering.

University College London

• Prof Mark Huckvale (co-investigator) is Professor of Speech Science and Head of the Dept of Speech, Hearing and Phonetic Sciences.
• Prof Stuart Rosen (co-investigator) is Professor of Speech and Hearing Science the Dept of Speech, Hearing and Phonetic Sciences and a Fellow of the Acoustical Society of America.
• Dr Tim Green (researcher) is Senior Research Fellow in the Dept of Speech, Hearing and Phonetic Sciences.
• Dr Gaston Hilkhuysen (researcher) is Research Fellow in the Dept of Speech, Hearing and Phonetic Sciences.