A real-time tone enhancement method for continuous Mandarin speeches

Chinese Mandarin is a tonal language. Tone perception ability of people with sensorineural hearing loss (SNHL) is often weaker than normal people. To help the SNHL people better perceive and distinguish tone information in Chinese speech, we focus on real-time tone enhancement method for mandarin continuous speeches. In this paper, based on the experimental investigation on the acoustic features most related to tone perception, we propose a practical tone enhancing model which employs the unified features independent of Chinese tonal patterns. Using this model, we further implement a real-time tone enhancement method which can avoid syllable segmentation and tonal pattern recognition. By the tone identification test for the normal and SNHL people under both quiet and noisy backgrounds, it is found that the enhanced speeches with the proposed method gains an average 5% higher correct rate compared to original speeches. And the time delay of the enhancement method can be controlled within 800ms, which can be further used in hearing aids to benefit the SNHL people in their daily life.