Real-time dual-microphone noise classification for environment-adaptive pipelines of cochlear implants

This paper presents an improved noise classification in environment-adaptive speech processing pipelines of cochlear implants. This improvement is achieved by using a dual-microphone and by using a computationally efficient feature-level combination approach to achieve real-time operation. A new measure named Suppression Advantage is also defined in order to quantify the noise suppression improvement of an entire pipeline due to noise classification. The noise classification and suppression improvement results are presented for four commonly encountered noise environments.