A recent approach to signal segmentation in additive noise [1, 2] uses features of small spectrogram sub-units accrued over the full spectrogram. The original work considered chirp signals in additive white Gaussian noise. This paper extends this work first by considering similar signals at different signal-to-noise ratios and then in the context of speech recognition. For the chirp case, a cos...

UNLABELLED Studies have shown that elderly people with cognitive impairments benefit more from hearing aids with slower recovery times. OBJECTIVE To study participation constraints and speech recognition in noise of elderly subjects equipped with hearing aids of different recovery times according to cognitive impairment status. METHOD Fifty subjects aged between 60 and 80 years were followe...

We propose time-frequency domain methods for noise estimation and speech enhancement. A speech presence detection method is used to find connected time-frequency regions of speech presence. These regions are used by a noise estimationmethod and both the speech presence decisions and the noise estimate are used in the speech enhancement method. Different attenuation rules are applied to regions ...

This study sought to evaluate the effect of speech intensity on performance of the Callsign Acquisition Test (CAT) and Modified Rhyme Test (MRT) presented in noise. Fourteen normally hearing listeners performed both tests in 65 dB A white background noise. Speech intensity varied while background noise remained constant to form speech-to-noise ratios (SNRs) of −18, −15, −12, −9, and −6 dB. Resu...

The performance of passive hearing protection is normally quantified by the sound attenuation or insertion loss (IL). The IL allows prediction of the noise level at the eardrum for a given ambient noise spectrum. A subjective test (with test-signal levels at the threshold of hearing) is normally used to measure the sound attenuation. Active noise reduction requires a different assessment method...

The subject of this paper is robust voice activity detection (VAD) in noisy environments, especially in car environments. We present a comparison between several frame based VAD feature extraction algorithms in combination with different classifiers. Experiments are carried out under equal test conditions using clean speech, clean speech with added car noise and speech recorded in car environme...

The performance of passive hearing protection is normally quantified by the sound attenuation or insertion loss (IL). The IL allows prediction of the noise level at the eardrum for a given ambient noise spectrum. A subjective test (with test-signal levels at the threshold of hearing) is normally used to measure the sound attenuation. Active noise reduction requires a different assessment method...

Speech recognition occurs when attending to speech stimuli in auditory, visual, or audiovisual modalities under optimum (e.g., in silence) or degraded listening conditions (i.e., in background noise or in individuals with hearing impairment). The present thesis contains details of the first study to show how background noise (steady-state white noise) delayed the identification of different typ...

This article presents a simple method of analysing speech test scores which are biased through ceiling effects. Eighty postlingually deafened adults implanted with a MED-EL COMBI 40/40+ cochlear implant (CI) were administered a numbers test and a sentence test at initial device activation and at 1, 3, 6, 12 and 24 months thereafter. As a measure for speech recognition performance, the number of...