Development and Objective Perceptual Quality Assessment of Monaural and Binaural Noise Reduction Schemes for Hearing Aids Von der Fakultät für Mathematik und Naturwissenschaften der Carl-von-Ossietzky-Universität Oldenburg

Abstract

People with hearing impairment have great difficulties communicating in noisy and reverberant environments. They usually require a higher signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) to achieve the same listening performance as normal hearing people. But even for normal hearing people a noise reduction is desirable in these environments, especially when using modern communication systems such as mobile phones, handsfree devices, or teleconferencing systems. Hence, the development and evaluation of noise reduction algorithms is an active field of research. To achieve the maximum performance and subjective benefit, these algorithms generally need to be evaluated with objective measures that should be based on auditory models in order to predict human perception as closely as possible. The current dissertation contributes to this field by adding yet another dimension to the problem-binaural hearing (i.e., listening with two ears). As a starting point of this thesis, some frequently used objective performance measures and novel objective measures based on recent knowledge of the auditory system are reviewed. Using subjective listening tests on signals processed by monaural noise reductio