On Improving Telephone Speech Intelligibility for Hearing Impaired Persons

Due to its limited acoustic bandwidth, conventional telephone speech is poorly intelligible, particularly for older and/or hearing impaired persons. Artificial bandwidth extension (ABWE) aims at improving the intelligibility of narrowband (NB) speech by estimating and reconstructing the missing frequency components. Being employed at the receiver side, it does not require changes in the speech transmission system. Hence, it could be integrated into a telephone or directly into the hearing aid. This paper investigates the potential of ABWE to improve the intelligibility of NB telephone speech for hearing impaired persons wearing a hearing aid. Subjective listening tests on meaningless German logatomes demonstrate a significant improvement for critical fricatives, particularly for /s/.