Coding of Electrical Stimulation Patterns for Binaural Sound Coding Strategies for Cochlear Implants

Binaural sound coding strategies can improve speech intelligibility for cochlear implant (CI) users. These require a signal transmission between two CIs. As power consumption needs to be kept low in CIs, efficient coding or bit-rate reduction of the signals is necessary. In this work, it is proposed to code the electrical signals or excitation patterns (EP) of the CI instead of the audio signals captured by the microphones. For this purpose we designed a differential pulse code modulation based codec with zero algorithmic delay to code the EP of the advanced combination encoder (ACE) sound coding strategy for CIs. Our EP codec was compared to the G.722 64 kbit/s audio codec using the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) as objective measure of quality. On two audio-sets the mean SNR was 0.5 to 13.9 dB higher when coding the EP with the proposed coding method while achieving a mean bit-rate between 34.1 and 40.3 kbit/s.