English

Noise-Robust Hearing Aid Voice Control

Audio and Speech Processing 2024-12-04 v3

Abstract

Advancing the design of robust hearing aid (HA) voice control is crucial to increase the HA use rate among hard of hearing people as well as to improve HA users' experience. In this work, we contribute towards this goal by, first, presenting a novel HA speech dataset consisting of noisy own voice captured by 2 behind-the-ear (BTE) and 1 in-ear-canal (IEC) microphones. Second, we provide baseline HA voice control results from the evaluation of light, state-of-the-art keyword spotting models utilizing different combinations of HA microphone signals. Experimental results show the benefits of exploiting bandwidth-limited bone-conducted speech (BCS) from the IEC microphone to achieve noise-robust HA voice control. Furthermore, results also demonstrate that voice control performance can be boosted by assisting BCS by the broader-bandwidth BTE microphone signals. Aiming at setting a baseline upon which the scientific community can continue to progress, the HA noisy speech dataset has been made publicly available.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2411.03150,
  title  = {Noise-Robust Hearing Aid Voice Control},
  author = {Iván López-Espejo and Eros Roselló and Amin Edraki and Naomi Harte and Jesper Jensen},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2411.03150},
  year   = {2024}
}

Comments

Accepted by IEEE Signal Processing Letters

R2 v1 2026-06-28T19:48:59.974Z