Note: This bibliographic page is archived and will no longer be updated. For an up-to-date list of publications from the Music Technology Group see the Publications list .

Low Latency Audio Source Separation for Speech Enhancement in Cochlear Implants

Title Low Latency Audio Source Separation for Speech Enhancement in Cochlear Implants
Publication Type Master Thesis
Year of Publication 2012
Authors Hidalgo, J.
preprint/postprint document files/publications/Jordi-Hidalgo-Master-Thesis-2012.pdf
Abstract This master thesis is a combination of two areas of Sound and Music Computing, Blind Source Separation and Cochlear Implants. The research focuses in the evaluation of existing source separation algorithms in order to improve noise reduction strategies in the context of cochlear implants. The modi cation and adaptation of a low latency algorithm is the point of start for the evaluation based in the requirements of speech signals in cochlear implants. The evaluation consists in a di erent set of objective and subjective experiments to determine the speech intelligibility enhancement pro- duced by the separation process. Objective evaluation has revealed that a very good performance level is achieved with low latency algorithms compared to NMF which take considerably higher computation time. A series of subjective tests have been con- ducted with cochlear implant patients in order to compare the objective results and determine the real speech intelligibility level. The low latency algorithm showed only improvements in few situations where the noise reduction algorithm outperforms in most of the cases. Accurate analysis determined that the main reason of the speech degradation caused by low latency algorithm is because of the algorithm is not de- signed to detect unvoiced consonants and a lot of speech content is missing. But last experiments revealed that is possible to recover this consonants which can considerably improve the performance and later speech intelligibility of LLIS.