Advanced noise reduction and speech extraction for hearing aids and speech communication devices

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The research to be conducted from this research proposal is for the development of innovative and efficient solutions for noise reduction and speech extraction in digital speech processing devices. In particular, the emphasis will be on hearing aids, although several of the expected research outcomes are also applicable to other speech devices such as the ones used in hands-free or mobile telephony and automatic speech recognition systems. Hearing aids have been available for a few decades, but the hearing aid adoption rate still remains low today. While there are several socio-economic factors that affect the decision of opting whether or not to use a hearing aid, one factor is that under some challenging yet common acoustic environments, the overall performance of hearing aids has remained fairly poor because of the limited performance of noise reduction and speech extraction algorithms. Other important applications share the same shortcomings as hearing aids: for example mobile telephony devices, Bluetooth headsets, and speech recognition systems, where the performance degrades significantly under some challenging acoustic environments. Even though a very significant amount of work has been achieved in the area of noise reduction and speech extraction over the years, there are still issues to be solved and algorithms to be improved for those systems to work satisfactorily in several difficult practical environments. The new research to be conducted in this project proposes innovations to address some of the main issues limiting the performance of noise reduction and speech extraction systems. A successful completion of the proposed research would go a long way in improving the overall performance of noise reduction and speech extraction technologies, leading to tangible improvements in several applications which are important both from a healthcare perspective and a commercial perspective.