Near-End Listening Enhancement (NELE)

Problem: Speech Intelligibility in Noisy Environment

• Scenarios with remote speech communication in noisy environment
• Background noise cannot be cancelled
• Local noise reduces speech intelligibility and increases listening effort

Approach

• Preprocess speech by adaptive equalizer
• Adaptation based on current background noise characteristics
• Goal: Maximize speech intelligibility for local listener, reduce masking

Results

• Significantly higher intelligibility, even without additional speech power
• Reduced listening effort
• Protection against hearing damage

[sauert06]
Bastian Sauert and Peter Vary
Near End Listening Enhancement: Speech Intelligibility Improvement in Noisy Environments
Proceedings of IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (ICASSP), May 2006

[sauert10a]
Bastian Sauert and Peter Vary
Recursive Closed-Form Optimization of Spectral Audio Power Allocation for Near End Listening Enhancement
ITG-Fachtagung Sprachkommunikation, October 2010

[sauert14]
Bastian Sauert
Near-End Listening Enhancement: Theory and Application
Dissertation, May 2014

[niermann15]
Markus Niermann, Florian Heese, and Peter Vary
Intelligibility Enhancement For Hands-Free Mobile Communication
Proceedings of German Annual Conference on Acoustics (DAGA), 2015

[niermann16]
Markus Niermann, Peter Jax, and Peter Vary
Noise Estimation For Speech Reinforcement in the Presence of Strong Echoes
Proceedings of IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (ICASSP), 2016

[niermann16b]
Markus Niermann, Peter Jax, and Peter Vary
Near-End Listening Enhancement by Noise-Inverse Speech Shaping
Proceedings of European Signal Processing Conference (EUSIPCO), August 2016

[niermann16c]
Markus Niermann, Christian Thierfeld, Peter Jax, and Peter Vary
Time Domain Approach for Listening Enhancement in Noisy Environments
ITG-Fachtagung Sprachkommunikation, October 2016