The world could one day see a brain-inspired speech enhancer solution thanks to new research about how sound is coded within the brain.
A team of researchers from the Universities of Southampton and Cambridge is working to understand how the human brain hears sound to help develop improved hearing aids and automatic speech recognition systems. To do so, they are trying to develop physiologically-inspired algorithms, which mimic how a brain hears sound to improve on traditional signal processing algorithms.
What’s new about the research is that instead of looking at signal energy, as current artificial devices do, scientists are concentrating on how the brain processes sound information instead.
The researchers said that once they better understand how sound is coded, they believe they will be able to select the parts that code speech and the ones that code unwanted noise. The researchers then hope to re-synthesize sound in hearing aids with reduced noise, but keeping quality intact, to enhance speech intelligibility.
According to the researchers, current speech enhancement systems can reduce noise and increase speech quality, but are not good at improving speech intelligibility, especially in noisy situations where users have to concentrate to pick out single speakers.
“Today, it is still the ultimate goal for the speech signal processing community to develop speech enhancement systems that perform as well as humans in noisy situations,” said Dr. Stefan Bleeck, from the Institute of Sound and Vibration Research at the University of Southampton. “Normal hearing humans still easily outperform any technical system, sound processing in the brain is more successful than signal processing in silicone. A system that works as well as a human would lead to the next revolution in human communication and would greatly benefit hearing impaired people.”
Dr. Bleeck received funding from a Google Research Award to conduct the research with ISVR colleague Dr. Matthew Wright, and Dr. Ian Winter of the University of Cambridge’s Department of Physiology.
“My vision is to build a brain-inspired speech enhancer in the next five years, which will be able to identify sound sources and to enhance speech intelligibility,” Bleeck said. “This should be useful in everyday situations, for hearing impaired as well as normal hearing people, so that it ultimately reduces the stigma that hearing aids have today. Using this device in the future to hear better should be as normal as wearing glasses today to see better.”
