Application of Binaural Models to Evaluate “Beamforming” in Digital Hearing AIDS

Christopher Schweitzer
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引用次数: 3

Abstract

It should come as no surprise to the reader that a great deal of attention and effort in hear ing aid research has been devoted to methods to reduce the interference of noise for hear ing aid users. This has been a repeated priority topic of "requests for proposals" for research funding from the National Institutes of Deafness and other Communicat ion Disorders (1994, 1995, 1996 listed priorities in Public Health Services Small Business Innovative Research request for proposals), and dozens of articles and papers in recent years have addressed the issue (e.g., Fabry, 1991; Killion, 1993; Van Tasell, 1993; Weiss & Neuman, 1993). In engineering terms, the noise problem for hear ing aids can be thought of as one of target-to-jammer ratios (TJRs), where the target is the desired speech signal (for a particular moment ) and any other interfering sounds are deemed to be jammers. Saying that a poor TJR makes conversation difficult is another way to say that noise interferes with hear ing a desired signal. Since hearingimpaired listeners generally require higher TJRs than normal hear ing listeners (Plomp, 1978, 1986; Tillman, Carhart, & Olsen, 1970; Van Tasell, 1993; Welze-Mueller & Sattler, 1984), the problem often has been made worse by simple amplification schemes that perceptually seem to increase the j ammers disproportionately more than the desired targets. The situation is greatly aggravated by the fact that "noise" is often a moment-tomomen t decision by the listener and not a specific spectrally defined or acoustically constant entity. Figure 1 provides an illustration of the t ime-dependent nature on a listener's decision of whether a particular sound is a noise j a m m e r or a desirable target signal. For example, for many hearing aid users the spouse's voice is generally a desired target. But in those instances when the spouse is conversing with someone else and the listener has turned his or her attention to the voice on the television, the spouse's voice obviously becomes a j a m m e r that would ideally be reduced by an intelligent hearing device. This situation is true for many other daily sounds. Another example might be the noise of an automobile's starter cranking to initiate combustion. This is an important signal when turning the key and the hearing of it informs the driver when to release the key from the start position. But if someone else is starting the car, the same acoustic pattern is entirely unwanted noise. This aspect of the situation dependency of noise has probably received insufficient attention by clinicians and hearing aid engineers. The desire to move auditory attention within a room containing
双耳模型在数字助听器“波束形成”评估中的应用
对于读者来说,在助听器研究中投入了大量的注意力和精力来研究如何减少噪音对助听器使用者的干扰,这应该不足为奇。这一直是国家耳聋和其他交流障碍研究所(1994年、1995年、1996年在公共卫生服务小企业创新研究申请提案中列出的优先事项)研究经费"征求建议书"的优先主题,近年来有数十篇文章和论文讨论了这个问题(例如,Fabry, 1991年;•基奈,1993;Van Tasell, 1993;Weiss & Neuman, 1993)。在工程术语中,助听器的噪声问题可以被认为是目标与干扰比(TJRs)之一,其中目标是所需的语音信号(在特定时刻),而任何其他干扰声音都被认为是干扰。说糟糕的TJR使谈话困难是另一种说法,即噪音干扰了听到想要的信号。因为听力受损的听者通常比正常听者需要更高的tjr (Plomp, 1978, 1986;蒂尔曼,卡哈特和奥尔森,1970;Van Tasell, 1993;Welze-Mueller & Sattler, 1984),这个问题常常因为简单的放大方案而变得更糟,这些方案在感知上似乎不成比例地增加了干扰者,而不是预期的目标。由于“噪音”通常是听者一时的决定,而不是特定的频谱定义或声学恒定的实体,这一事实大大加剧了这种情况。图1展示了听者判断特定声音是噪声、噪声、噪声还是理想的目标信号时的时间依赖性。例如,对于许多助听器使用者来说,配偶的声音通常是一个理想的目标。但在这种情况下,当配偶与他人交谈时,听者将注意力转向电视上的声音,配偶的声音显然会变成一种嘈杂的声音,这种声音最好能被智能助听器消除。这种情况也适用于许多其他的日常声音。另一个例子可能是汽车启动器启动燃烧时发出的噪音。当转动钥匙时,这是一个重要的信号,听到它可以通知驾驶员何时从启动位置释放钥匙。但如果有人在发动汽车,同样的声音模式完全是不必要的噪音。这方面的情况对噪音的依赖性可能没有得到临床医生和助听器工程师足够的重视。在一个房间里转移听觉注意力的欲望
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