Affine modulation-based audiogram fusion network for joint noise reduction and hearing loss compensation

Abstract

Hearing aids (HAs) are widely used to provide personalized speech enhancement (PSE) services, improving the quality of life for individuals with hearing loss. However, HA performance significantly declines in noisy environments as it treats noise reduction (NR) and hearing loss compensation (HLC) as separate tasks. This separation leads to a lack of systematic optimization, overlooking the interactions between these two critical tasks, and increases the system complexity. To address these challenges, we propose a novel audiogram fusion network, named AFN-HearNet, which simultaneously tackles the NR and HLC tasks by fusing cross-domain audiogram and spectrum features. We propose an audiogram-specific encoder that transforms the sparse audiogram profile into a deep representation, addressing the alignment problem of cross-domain features prior to fusion. To incorporate the interactions between NR and HLC tasks, we propose the affine modulation-based audiogram fusion frequency-temporal Conformer that adaptively fuses these two features into a unified deep representation for speech reconstruction. Furthermore, we introduce a voice activity detection auxiliary training task to embed speech and non-speech patterns into the unified deep representation implicitly. We conduct comprehensive experiments across multiple datasets to validate the effectiveness of each proposed module. The results indicate that the AFN-HearNet significantly outperforms state-of-the-art in-context fusion joint models regarding key metrics such as HASQI and PESQ, achieving a considerable trade-off between performance and efficiency. The source code and data will be released at https://github.com/deepnetni/AFN-HearNet.