DEVELOPMENT AND EVALUATION OF ENVELOPE, SPECTRAL AND TIME ENHANCEMENT ALGORITHMS FOR AUDITORY NEUROPATHY

Auditory neuropathy (AN) is a hearing disorder that reduces the ability to detect temporal cues in speech, thus leading to deprived speech perception. Traditional amplification and frequency shifting techniques used in modern hearing aids are not suitable to assist individuals with AN due to the unique symptoms that result from the disorder. This study proposes a method for combining both speech envelope enhancement and time scaling to combine the proven benefits of each algorithm. In addition, spectral enhancement is cascaded with envelope and time enhancement to address the poor frequency discrimination in AN. The proposed speech enhancement strategy was evaluated using an AN simulator with normal hearing listeners under varying degrees of AN severity. The results showed a significant increase in word recognition scores for time scaling and envelope enhancement over envelope enhancement alone. Furthermore, the addition of spectral enhancement resulted in further increase in word recognition at profound AN severity.

Name thesis:degree_name

MES

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Electrical and Computer Engineering

Year dc:date.issued

2011

Author dc:creator

• Morgan, Benjamin Robert

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Parsa, Vijay

• Auditory neuropathy
• hearing disorders
• digital signal processing
• speech processing
• envelope enhancement
• time scale modification
• spectral enhancement
• sentence recognition

Handle dc:identifier.uri

https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.14721/18284

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:uwo.scholaris.ca:20.500.14721/18284