Acoustic Beamforming for Hearing AIDs: New Approach in Speech Processing

Hearing impaired persons lose their ability to distinguish speech signal in ambient noise. Human hearing system is sensitive to interfering noise. Interfering noise decreases the quality and intelligibility of the speech signal which in turn makes speech communication default. To make the speech signal effective and useful for hearing impaired, they need to be enhanced from noisy speech signal. Speech enhancement is one of the most emerging and useful branch in signal processing, to reduce the noise and improves the perceptual quality and intelligibility of the speech signal. Microphone array is one of the signal processing technique implemented in hearing aids to provide a better solution to the problem encountered by the hearing impaired person when listening to speech in the presence of background noise.The main focus of the thesis is to implement a GSC using microphone array, the blocking matrix in the GSC is replaced with Elko’s algorithm. Elko’s algorithm is used to track and attenuate interference or background noise located in the back half plane of the array of microphones.