Predictive measures of the intelligibility of speech processed by noise reduction algorithms

Authors

  • Karolina Smeds Widex A/S, ORCA Europe, Stockholm, Sweden
  • Florian Wolters Widex A/S, ORCA Europe, Stockholm, Sweden; Univeristy of Applied Sciences, Oldenburg, Germany
  • Arne Leijon KTH, Stockholm, Sweden
  • Sara Båsjö Widex A/S, ORCA Europe, Stockholm, Sweden
  • Sofia Hertzman Widex A/S, ORCA Europe, Stockholm, Sweden

Abstract

A number of predictive measures were evaluated in terms of their ability to predict the effect on speech intelligibility of different types of noise reduc- tion (NR). Twenty listeners with hearing impairment and ten listeners with normal hearing participated in a blinded laboratory study. An adaptive speech test was used. The speech test produce results in terms of physical signal-to-noise ratios that correspond to equal speech recognition perfor- mance with and without the NR algorithms, which facilitates a direct statis- tical test of how well the predictive measures agree with the experimental results. Three NR algorithms and a reference condition were compared. The experimental results were used to evaluate a number of predictive measures, including a standard Speech Intelligibility Index (SII) method, two time- variable SII methods, and one coherence-based SII method. Further, one measure based on the correlation between band envelope magnitudes of clean and processed noisy speech was evaluated. The measures that make short-time analyses of both speech and noise did best in the comparison.

References

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Additional Files

Published

2011-12-15

How to Cite

Smeds, K., Wolters, F., Leijon, A., Båsjö, S., & Hertzman, S. (2011). Predictive measures of the intelligibility of speech processed by noise reduction algorithms. Proceedings of the International Symposium on Auditory and Audiological Research, 3, 355–362. Retrieved from https://proceedings.isaar.eu/index.php/isaarproc/article/view/2011-41

Issue

Section

2011/3. Models of speech processing and perception