Speech intelligibility enhancement in a power generating noise environment

A previous paper described a method for processing speech which resulted in the enhancement of speech intelligibility in the presence of high noise levels at the listener. This processing technqiue consists of high-pass filtering followed by rapid amplitude compression. A significant intelligibility gain was achieved over unprocessed speech for signal-to-noise ratios from -10 to +10 dB (noise at 90 dB). In this previous work, only white noise was considered. In the present paper, results are presented for this processing technique for a listener in the environment of power generating noise.