KEMAR 마네킹을 이용한 단이 보청기용 FDSI 빔포밍 알고리즘의 정량적 평가

Abstract

To enhance the speech perception of hearing aid users in noisy environment, most hearing aid devices adopt various beamforming algorithms such as the first-order differential microphone (DM1) and the two-stage directional microphone (DM2) algorithms that maintain sounds from the direction of the interlocutor and reduce the ambient sounds from the other directions. However, these conventional algorithms represent poor directionality ability in low frequency area. Therefore, to enhance the speech perception of hearing aid uses in low frequency range, our group had suggested a fractional delay subtraction and integration (FDSI) algorithm and estimated its theoretical performance using computer simulation in previous article. In this study, we performed a KEMAR test in non-reverberant room that compares the performance of DM1, DM2, broadband beamforming (BBF), and proposed FDSI algorithms using several objective indices such as a signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) improvement, a segmental SNR (seg-SNR) improvement, a perceptual evaluation of speech quality (PESQ), and an Itakura-Saito measure (IS). Experimental results showed that the performance of the FDSI algorithm was −3.26-7.16 dB in SNR improvement, −1.94-5.41 dB in segSNR improvement, 1.49-2.79 in PESQ, and 0.79-3.59 in IS, which demonstrated that the FDSI algorithm showed the highest improvement of SNR and segSNR, and the lowest IS. We believe that the proposed FDSI algorithm has a potential as a beamformer for digital hearing aid devices.