A targeting-and-extracting technique to enhance hearing in the presence of competing speech

A targeting-and-extracting procedure of speech enhancement for hearing aids in the presence of background noise, especially competing speech, is proposed. The procedure is composed of two steps: targeting by a fixed (or deterministic) beamforming array, followed by a post-targeting extracting step. Emphasis is placed on the extracting step, which performs noise cancellation based on the acoustic difference between the desired speech and interfering speech. Either comb filtering or attenuation is applied to the signal in accordance with the current voiced/unvoiced/silence state of the desired signal. The comb filter design is based on the fundamental pitch frequency of the desired speech. Algorithms for deciding the voiced/unvoiced/silence state and determining the fundamental frequency are developed. The performance of the system is evaluated through computer simulation. The simulation results indicate significant noise cancellation and intelligibility improvement.