Automatic switching between noise classification and speech enhancement for hearing aid devices

This paper presents a voice activity detector (VAD) for automatic switching between a noise classifier and a speech enhancer as part of the signal processing pipeline of hearing aid devices. The developed VAD consists of a computationally efficient feature extractor and a random forest classifier. Previously used signal features as well as two newly introduced signal features are extracted and fed into the classifier to perform automatic switching. This switching approach is compared to two popular VADs. The results obtained indicate the introduced approach outperforms these existing approaches in terms of both detection rate and processing time.