In this paper, we propose a speech waveform modification method which incorporates a hearing impairment simulator, to improve speech intelligibility for the hearing-impaired. The settings of hearing aid devices usually need to be manually adjusted to suit the needs of each user, which creates a significant burden. To address this issue, the proposed method creates a spectral shaping filter, using a hearing impairment simulator capable of estimating speech signals as perceived by a specific hearing-impaired person. We conduct objective and subjective evaluations through simulations using the hearing impairment simulator. Our experimental results demonstrate that; 1) the proposed spectral shaping filter can significantly improve both speech intelligibility and quality, 2) the filter can be combined with a well-known speech intelligibility enhancement technique based on power compensation using dynamic range compression (DRC), and 3) speech intelligibility can be further improved by controlling the trade-off between filtering and DRC-based power compensation.
Cite as: Hikosaka, S., Seki, S., Hayashi, T., Kobayashi, K., Takeda, K., Banno, H., Toda, T. (2020) Intelligibility Enhancement Based on Speech Waveform Modification Using Hearing Impairment. Proc. Interspeech 2020, 4059-4063, doi: 10.21437/Interspeech.2020-2062
@inproceedings{hikosaka20_interspeech,
author={Shu Hikosaka and Shogo Seki and Tomoki Hayashi and Kazuhiro Kobayashi and Kazuya Takeda and Hideki Banno and Tomoki Toda},
title={{Intelligibility Enhancement Based on Speech Waveform Modification Using Hearing Impairment}},
year=2020,
booktitle={Proc. Interspeech 2020},
pages={4059--4063},
doi={10.21437/Interspeech.2020-2062}
}