The digital wireless microphones systems for hearing aids have been developed to provide a clean and intelligible speech signal to hearing-impaired listeners for, e.g., school or teleconference applications. In this technology, the voice of the speaker is picked up by a body-worn microphone, wirelessly transmitted to the hearing aids and rendered in a diotic way (same signal at both ears), preventing any speaker localization clues from being provided. The reported algorithm performs a real-time binaural localization and tracking of the talker so that the clean speech signal can then be spatialized, according to its estimated position relative to the aided listener. This feature is supposed to increase comfort, sense of immersion, and intelligibility for the users of such wireless microphone systems.

Authors: Courtois, Gilles; Marmaroli, Patrick; Lissek, Hervé; Oesch, Yves; Balande, William
Affiliations: Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL), Lausanne, Switzerland; Phonak Communciations AG, Murten, Switzerland(See document for exact affiliation information.)
AES Convention: 138 (May 2015) Paper Number: 9242
Publication Date: May 6, 2015
Subject: Spatial Audio

Click to purchase paper as a non-member or you can login as an AES member to see more options.

No AES members have commented on this paper yet.

Subscribe to this discussion

To be notified of new comments on this paper you can subscribe to this RSS feed. Forum users should login to see additional options.

Start a discussion!

If you would like to start a discussion about this paper and are an AES member then you can login here:
Username:
Password:

If you are not yet an AES member and have something important to say about this paper then we urge you to join the AES today and make your voice heard. You can join online today by clicking here.