Predictive measures of the intelligibility of speech processed by noise reduction algorithms
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
Byrne, D., and Dillon, H. (1986). "The National Acoustic Laboratories' (NAL) new procedure for selecting the gain and frequency response of a hearing aid" Ear Hear., 7, 257-265.
Hagerman, B. (1982). "Sentences for testing speech intelligibility in noise" Scand. Audiol., 11, 79-87.
Hagerman, B., and Olofsson, Å. (2004). "A method to measure the effect of noise reduction algorithms using simultaneous speech and noise" Acta Acustica, united with Acustica, 90, 356-361.
Holube, I., Fredelake, S., Vlaming, M., and Kollmeier, B. (2010). "Development and analysis of an International Speech Test Signal (ISTS)" Int. J. Audiol., 49, 891-903.
Kates, J. M., and Arehart, K. H. (2005). "Coherence and the speech intelligibility index" J. Acoust. Soc. Am., 117, 2224-2237.
Loizou, P.C. (2007). Speech enhancement theory and practice. Boca Raton, FL, USA: Taylor & Francis Group.
Luts H., Eneman K., Wouters J., Schulte M., Vormann M., Büchler M., et al. (2010). "Multicenter evaluation of signal enhancement algorithms for hearing aids" J. Acoust. Soc. Am., 127, 1491-1505.
Pavlovic, C. V., Studebaker, G. A., and Sherbecoe, R. L. (1986). "An articulation index based procedure for predicting the speech recognition performance of hearing-impaired individuals" J. Acoust. Soc. Am., 80, 50-57.
Rhebergen, K. S. and Versfeld, N. J. (2005). "A Speech Intelligibility Index-based approach to predict the speech reception threshold for sentences in fluctua- ting noise for normal-hearing listeners" J. Acoust. Soc. Am., 117, 2181-2192.
Smeds, K., Bergman, N., Hertzman, S. and Nyman, T. (2009). "Noise reduction in modern hearing aids – Long-term average gain measurements using speech" in Proceedings of The International Symposium on Auditory and Audio- logical Research (ISAAR). Binaural processing and spatial hearing. Helsingør, Denmark. Edited by J. M. Buchholz, T. Dau, J. C. Dalsgaard and T. Poulsen, pp. 445-452.
Smeds, K., Wolters, F., Nilsson, A., Båsjö, S., Hertzman, S. and Leijon A. (2010). "Objective measures to quantify the perceptual effects of noise reduction in hearing aids" in Proceedings of The AES 38th International Conference - Sound quality evaluation. Audio Engineering Society, Piteå, Sweden. Edited by J. Vanderkooy, pp. 101-107.
Taal, C. H., Hendriks, R. C., Heusdens, R., and Jensen, J. (2010). "A short-time objective intelligibility measure for time-frequency weighted noisy speech" in Proceedings of ICASSP 2010, pp. 4214-4217.
Additional Files
Published
How to Cite
Issue
Section
License
Authors who publish with this journal agree to the following terms:
a. Authors retain copyright* and grant the journal right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License that allows others to share the work with an acknowledgement of the work's authorship and initial publication in this journal.
b. Authors are able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the journal's published version of the work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), with an acknowledgement of its initial publication in this journal.
c. Authors are permitted and encouraged to post their work online (e.g., in institutional repositories or on their website) prior to and during the submission process, as it can lead to productive exchanges, as well as earlier and greater citation of published work (See The Effect of Open Access).
*From the 2017 issue onward. The Danavox Jubilee Foundation owns the copyright of all articles published in the 1969-2015 issues. However, authors are still allowed to share the work with an acknowledgement of the work's authorship and initial publication in this journal.