Improving low pass filtered speech intelligibility using nonlinear frequency compression with cepstrum and spectral envelope transformation

Abstract

Person with high frequency hearing loss cannot perceive speech containing high frequency component. However, the hearing impaired person still has significant residual hearing at lower frequency region. As such, we propose a method to overcome this by applying the nonlinear frequency compression method to the estimated spectral envelope before transposing the high frequency component to the lower frequency region. The use of the compression method is expected to improve the speech intelligibility of the low pass filtered speech which simulates the high frequency hearing loss condition. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.