Smartphone Based Multi-Channel Dynamic-Range Compression for Hearing Aid Research and Noise-Robust Speech Source Localization Using Microphone Arrays

Abstract

Dynamic-range compression (DRC) is one technique of audio signal processing which maps the wide dynamic range of audio into the narrow range. In most of hearing aid devices (HADs), DRC plays as an important role to help hearing impaired people to listen to the speech with better quality and intelligibility. Compared to single-channel DRC, multi-channel DRC additionally improves the audio quality and intelligibility by setting appropriate adjustment parameters for every frequency band. Since most HADs are costly and unaffordable, fitting multi-channel DRC into smartphones becomes an outstanding solution since most people own smartphones. In this dissertation, three types of multi-channel DRCs has been proposed including their real-time implementations on smartphones. Speech Source Localization (SSL) (or Direction of Arrival (DOA) estimation) is another topic in this dissertation, which identifies the direction of the talker of interest in a noisy environment using multiple fixed microphones (known as a Microphone Array). This Proposal mainly covers only DRC, DOA and real-time implementation