Analog circuit implementation for speech enhancement purposes

Human speech is the main method for personal communication. However, interfering noise could degrade the intelligibility of speech, eventually resulting in errors. Thus, efficient speech enhancement algorithms are needed for example in hand held battery powered hearing aids. This paper presents an implementation of a time domain method for speech enhancement purposes: the adaptive gain equalizer. The implementation is carried out on a printed circuit board using common analog electronic components, and evaluated in real-time. The proposed solution benefits from high system bandwidth, it neither quantizes nor digitalizes data, and it is likely to have more efficient power consumption as opposed to many digital signal processor (DSP) based solutions. The evaluation proves the speech enhancement performance of the analog circuit implementation.