Cochlear implants are neural prostheses which give a sense of hearing to deaf people by stimulating the auditory nerve. In many users they restore the ability to understand speech in quiet, but noise and reverberation cause severe problems. It seems that implant users have difficulties hearing out one source in a potpourri of sources. This so called “auditory scene analysis” relies, amongst oth...

In this article, we present the current state of art in binaural audio with focus on head-related transfer functions (HRTFs) and valuation methods virtual acoustics descriptive attributes. This combination provides a methodology, which delivers basis for research studies reality (VR) individual non-individual functions. Based largely explored localization perception static signals, review offer...

Earlier studies have shown that binaural dichotic presentation, using critical bandwidth based spectral splitting with perceptually balanced comb filters, helps in reducing the effect of spectral masking for persons with moderate bilateral sensorineural hearing impairment. It has been reported to provide an SNR advantage of 5 dB for normal hearing subjects under simulated hearing loss, and a re...

One major problem of people with hearing impairment is the 'Coctail-Party-Effect', i.e., the reduced ability to understand speech in noisy environments. Normal hearing listeners use binaural information, i.e., interaural level and phase/time differences in addition to monaural cues to localize sound sources in the environment. Based on the localization result and on the monaural cues, the liste...

Objective intelligibility measures are increasingly being used to assess the performance of speech processing algorithms, e.g. for hearing aids. It has been shown that the short time objective intelligibility (STOI) measure yields good results in this respect. In this paper we propose a binaural extension of the STOI measure, which predicts binaural advantage using a modified equalization cance...

Binaural noise-reduction techniques based on Multichannel Wiener filter (MWF) have been reported as promissory candidates to be used in binaural hearing aids because of their effective SNR improvement at any arbitrary direction of arrival of the target signal and the preservation of localization cues. There are different MWF techniques derived in the FFT domain. The use of an FFT-based processi...

This case is of a 70-year-old man with single-sided deafness (SSD) in the right ear since childhood, who developed a sudden severe hearing loss in the left ear at the age of 63. Eventually, after he received cochlear implants in both ears, he started to present behavioural auditory processing skills associated with binaural hearing, such as improved ability to understand speech in the presence...

Earlier investigations have shown that spectral splitting of speech signal helps in reducing the effect of spectral masking for persons with moderate bilateral sensorineural hearing loss. In spectral splitting, the speech signal is filtered using a pair of linear phase FIR comb filters with complementary magnitude responses for binaural dichotic presentation. The filter responses should be such...