Real-time Implementation of Multi-band Frequency Compression for Listeners with Moderate Sensorineural Impairment

Widening of auditory filters in persons with sensorineural hearing impairment leads to increased spectral masking and degraded speech perception. Multi-band frequency compression of the complex spectral samples using pitchsynchronous processing has been reported to increase speech perception by persons with moderate sensorineural loss. It is shown that implementation of multi-band frequency compression using fixed-frame processing along with leastsquares error based signal estimation reduces the processing delay and the speech output is perceptually similar to that from pitch-synchronous processing. The processing is implemented on a DSP board based on the 16-bit fixed-point processor TMS320C5515, and real-time operation is achieved using about one-tenth of its computing capacity.