A Multi-stage Low-latency Enhancement System for Hearing Aids

TL;DR

This paper presents a low-latency, multi-stage speech enhancement system for hearing aids that leverages phase information, head rotation data, and a novel windowing approach to improve speech clarity within strict latency constraints.

Contribution

It introduces a multi-stage enhancement framework utilizing phase and magnitude domains, asymmetric windowing, and head rotation data, advancing hearing aid speech processing.

Findings

Improved HASPI scores with the proposed system.

Effective utilization of phase information for enhancement.

Achieved low-latency processing within 5ms.

Abstract

This paper proposes an end-to-end system for the ICASSP 2023 Clarity Challenge. In this work, we introduce four major novelties: (1) a novel multi-stage system in both the magnitude and complex domains to better utilize phase information; (2) an asymmetric window pair to achieve higher frequency resolution with the 5ms latency constraint; (3) the integration of head rotation information and the mixture signals to achieve better enhancement; (4) a post-processing module that achieves higher hearing aid speech perception index (HASPI) scores with the hearing aid amplification stage provided by the baseline system.