Published Paper Details:

The perceptual effects of noise reduction differ between hearing aids. The results agree well with those of normal-hearing listeners in a previous study. None of the noise-reduction algorithms improved speech intelligibility, but all reduced the annoyance of noise. The noise reduction that scored best with respect to noise annoyance and preference had the worst intelligibility scores. The trade-off between intelligibility and listening comfort shows that preference measurements might be useful in addition to intelligibility measurements in the selection of noise reduction. The speech intelligibility of indoor public address systems is degraded by reverberation and background noise. This paper proposes a preprocessing method that combines speech enhancement and inverse filtering to improve the speech intelligibility in such environments. An energy redistribution speech enhancement method was modified for use in reverberation conditions, and an auditory-model-based fast inverse filter was designed to achieve better dereverberation performance. An experiment was performed in various noisy, reverberant environments, and the test results verified the stability and effectiveness of the proposed method.