Speech enhancement for hearing aids

The performance of hearing aids in noisy reverberant surroundings remains a major source of complaint and discomfort to wearers. Given the current capabilities and pace of development in microelectronics, the major problem is to find successful speech enhancement schemes. “Binaural unmasking” experiments demonstrate an enhancement advantage, due to binaural correlation properties, which can lower the hearing threshold in noise and there is evidence that this may operate in frequency sub-bands. The performance is presented of an adaptive sub-band noise cancellation scheme which supports the possibility of performing “binaural unmasking” outwith the body, and is shown to be capable of out-performing a standard noise-cancellation scheme in the presence of reverberation.