Near End Listening Enhancement by Means ofWarped Low Delay Filter-Banks

Abstract:
The concept of near end listening enhancement allows to improve the speech intelligibility of telecommunication devices in the presence of ambient background noise. It raises adaptively the average speech spectrum of the received signal from the far end speaker over the average noise spectrum of the near end background noise, which leads to reduced listening efforts for the near end listener. In this paper, we will propose an improved algorithm for near end listening enhancement which uses a non-uniform filter-bank with Bark-scaled frequency bands. The employed filter-bank has a significantly lower signal delay than commonly used non-uniform analysis-synthesis filter-banks. This allows to achieve a comparable speech intelligibility with low latency, which is of interest, e. g., for applications in mobile phones.