Listeners suffering from presbycusis (age-related hearing loss) often report difficulties when attempting to understand vocal announcements in public spaces. Current solutions that improve speech intelligibility for hearing-impaired subjects mainly consist of customized solutions, such as hearing aids. This study proposes a more generic strategy, which would enhance speech perception for both normal-hearing and hearing-impaired listeners, i.e. For All. It provides the early stages of such an approach. Digital filters with different degrees of hearing-loss compensation have been designed, getting inspired by the way hearing aids process speech signals. Subjective tests conducted on normal-hearing and presbycusis subjects confirmed that it is possible to improve speech intelligibility for both types of population simultaneously.
Cite as: Jemaa, A.B., Mechergui, N., Courtois, G., Mudry, A., Djaziri-Larbi, S., Turki, M., Lissek, H., Jaidane, M. (2015) Intelligibility enhancement of vocal announcements for public address systems: a design for all through a presbycusis pre-compensation filter. Proc. Interspeech 2015, 70-74, doi: 10.21437/Interspeech.2015-29
@inproceedings{jemaa15_interspeech,
author={A. Ben Jemaa and N. Mechergui and G. Courtois and A. Mudry and S. Djaziri-Larbi and M. Turki and H. Lissek and M. Jaidane},
title={{Intelligibility enhancement of vocal announcements for public address systems: a design for all through a presbycusis pre-compensation filter}},
year=2015,
booktitle={Proc. Interspeech 2015},
pages={70--74},
doi={10.21437/Interspeech.2015-29}
}