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Signal-to-Noise-Ratio-Aware Dynamic Range Compression in Hearing Aids

Fast-acting dynamic range compression is a level-dependent amplification scheme which aims to restore audibility for hearing-impaired listeners. However, when being applied to noisy speech at positive signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs), the gain function typically changes rapidly over time as it is drive...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores principales: May, Tobias, Kowalewski, Borys, Dau, Torsten
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: SAGE Publications 2018
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6100123/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/30117366
http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/2331216518790903
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author May, Tobias
Kowalewski, Borys
Dau, Torsten
author_facet May, Tobias
Kowalewski, Borys
Dau, Torsten
author_sort May, Tobias
collection PubMed
description Fast-acting dynamic range compression is a level-dependent amplification scheme which aims to restore audibility for hearing-impaired listeners. However, when being applied to noisy speech at positive signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs), the gain function typically changes rapidly over time as it is driven by the short-term fluctuations of the speech signal. This leads to an amplification of the noise components in the speech gaps, which reduces the output SNR and distorts the acoustic properties of the background noise. An adaptive compression scheme is proposed here which utilizes information about the SNR in different frequency channels to adaptively change the characteristics of the compressor. Specifically, fast-acting compression is applied to speech-dominated time-frequency (T-F) units where the SNR is high, while slow-acting compression is used to effectively linearize the processing for noise-dominated T-F units where the SNR is low. A systematic evaluation of this SNR-aware compression scheme showed that the effective compression of speech components embedded in noise was similar to that of a conventional fast-acting system, whereas natural fluctuations in the background noise were preserved in a similar way as when a slow-acting compressor was applied.
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spelling pubmed-61001232018-08-24 Signal-to-Noise-Ratio-Aware Dynamic Range Compression in Hearing Aids May, Tobias Kowalewski, Borys Dau, Torsten Trends Hear Original Article Fast-acting dynamic range compression is a level-dependent amplification scheme which aims to restore audibility for hearing-impaired listeners. However, when being applied to noisy speech at positive signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs), the gain function typically changes rapidly over time as it is driven by the short-term fluctuations of the speech signal. This leads to an amplification of the noise components in the speech gaps, which reduces the output SNR and distorts the acoustic properties of the background noise. An adaptive compression scheme is proposed here which utilizes information about the SNR in different frequency channels to adaptively change the characteristics of the compressor. Specifically, fast-acting compression is applied to speech-dominated time-frequency (T-F) units where the SNR is high, while slow-acting compression is used to effectively linearize the processing for noise-dominated T-F units where the SNR is low. A systematic evaluation of this SNR-aware compression scheme showed that the effective compression of speech components embedded in noise was similar to that of a conventional fast-acting system, whereas natural fluctuations in the background noise were preserved in a similar way as when a slow-acting compressor was applied. SAGE Publications 2018-08-17 /pmc/articles/PMC6100123/ /pubmed/30117366 http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/2331216518790903 Text en © The Author(s) 2018 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ Creative Commons Non Commercial CC BY-NC: This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 License (http://www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/) which permits non-commercial use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed as specified on the SAGE and Open Access pages (https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/open-access-at-sage).
spellingShingle Original Article
May, Tobias
Kowalewski, Borys
Dau, Torsten
Signal-to-Noise-Ratio-Aware Dynamic Range Compression in Hearing Aids
title Signal-to-Noise-Ratio-Aware Dynamic Range Compression in Hearing Aids
title_full Signal-to-Noise-Ratio-Aware Dynamic Range Compression in Hearing Aids
title_fullStr Signal-to-Noise-Ratio-Aware Dynamic Range Compression in Hearing Aids
title_full_unstemmed Signal-to-Noise-Ratio-Aware Dynamic Range Compression in Hearing Aids
title_short Signal-to-Noise-Ratio-Aware Dynamic Range Compression in Hearing Aids
title_sort signal-to-noise-ratio-aware dynamic range compression in hearing aids
topic Original Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6100123/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/30117366
http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/2331216518790903
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