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

根据这一研究方案进行的研究是为了开发用于数字语音处理设备中的降噪和语音提取的创新和高效的解决方案。特别是，重点将放在助听器上，尽管一些预期的研究成果也适用于其他语音设备，如用于免提或移动电话和自动语音识别系统的设备。助听器已经有几十年的历史了，但今天助听器的采用率仍然很低。虽然有几个社会经济因素影响着是否使用助听器的决定，但其中一个因素是，在一些具有挑战性但常见的声学环境中，由于降噪和语音提取算法的有限性能，助听器的整体性能仍然相当差。其他重要的应用与助听器有着相同的缺点：例如移动电话设备、蓝牙耳机和语音识别系统，在一些具有挑战性的声学环境中，这些应用的性能会显著下降。尽管多年来在降噪和语音提取领域已经完成了大量的工作，但要使这些系统在几个困难的实际环境中令人满意地工作，仍然有一些问题需要解决，算法仍然需要改进。该项目将进行的新研究提出了一些创新，以解决限制降噪和语音提取系统性能的一些主要问题。拟议研究的成功完成将大大有助于提高降噪和语音提取技术的整体性能，导致几个应用程序的切实改进，这些应用程序从医疗保健角度和商业角度都很重要。

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.