Stability-controlled hybrid adaptive feedback cancellation scheme for hearing AIDS
© 2018 Crown. Adaptive feedback cancellation (AFC) techniques are common in modern hearing aid devices (HADs) since these techniques have been successful in increasing the stable gain. Accordingly, there has been a significant effort to improve AFC technology, especially for open-fitting and in-ear...
| Main Authors: | , , , |
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| Format: | Journal Article |
| Published: |
Acoustical Society of America
2018
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| Online Access: | http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.11937/65785 |
| _version_ | 1848761203791233024 |
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| author | Nordholm, Sven Schepker, H. Tran, L. Doclo, S. |
| author_facet | Nordholm, Sven Schepker, H. Tran, L. Doclo, S. |
| author_sort | Nordholm, Sven |
| building | Curtin Institutional Repository |
| collection | Online Access |
| description | © 2018 Crown. Adaptive feedback cancellation (AFC) techniques are common in modern hearing aid devices (HADs) since these techniques have been successful in increasing the stable gain. Accordingly, there has been a significant effort to improve AFC technology, especially for open-fitting and in-ear HADs, for which howling is more prevalent due to the large acoustic coupling between the loudspeaker and the microphone. In this paper, the authors propose a hybrid AFC (H-AFC) scheme that is able to shorten the time it takes to recover from howling. The proposed H-AFC scheme consists of a switched combination adaptive filter, which is controlled by a soft-clipping-based stability detector to select either the standard normalized least mean squares (NLMS) algorithm or the prediction-error-method (PEM) NLMS algorithm to update the adaptive filter. The standard NLMS algorithm is used to obtain fast convergence, while the PEM-NLMS algorithm is used to provide a low bias solution. This stability-controlled adaptation is hence the means to improve performance in terms of both convergence rate as well as misalignment, while only slightly increasing computational complexity. The proposed H-AFC scheme has been evaluated for both speech and music signals, resulting in a significantly improved convergence and re-convergence rate, i.e., a shorter howling period, as well as a lower average misalignment and a larger added stable gain compared to using either the NLMS or the PEM-NLMS algorithm alone. An objective evaluation using the perceptual evaluation of speech quality and the perceptual evaluation of audio quality measures shows that the proposed H-AFC scheme provides very high-quality speech and music signals. This has also been verified through a subjective listening experiment with N = 15 normal-hearing subjects using a multi-stimulus test with hidden reference and anchor, showing that the proposed H-AFC scheme results in a better perceptual quality than the state-of-the-art PEM-NLMS algorithm. |
| first_indexed | 2025-11-14T10:27:57Z |
| format | Journal Article |
| id | curtin-20.500.11937-65785 |
| institution | Curtin University Malaysia |
| institution_category | Local University |
| last_indexed | 2025-11-14T10:27:57Z |
| publishDate | 2018 |
| publisher | Acoustical Society of America |
| recordtype | eprints |
| repository_type | Digital Repository |
| spelling | curtin-20.500.11937-657852018-02-19T08:06:18Z Stability-controlled hybrid adaptive feedback cancellation scheme for hearing AIDS Nordholm, Sven Schepker, H. Tran, L. Doclo, S. © 2018 Crown. Adaptive feedback cancellation (AFC) techniques are common in modern hearing aid devices (HADs) since these techniques have been successful in increasing the stable gain. Accordingly, there has been a significant effort to improve AFC technology, especially for open-fitting and in-ear HADs, for which howling is more prevalent due to the large acoustic coupling between the loudspeaker and the microphone. In this paper, the authors propose a hybrid AFC (H-AFC) scheme that is able to shorten the time it takes to recover from howling. The proposed H-AFC scheme consists of a switched combination adaptive filter, which is controlled by a soft-clipping-based stability detector to select either the standard normalized least mean squares (NLMS) algorithm or the prediction-error-method (PEM) NLMS algorithm to update the adaptive filter. The standard NLMS algorithm is used to obtain fast convergence, while the PEM-NLMS algorithm is used to provide a low bias solution. This stability-controlled adaptation is hence the means to improve performance in terms of both convergence rate as well as misalignment, while only slightly increasing computational complexity. The proposed H-AFC scheme has been evaluated for both speech and music signals, resulting in a significantly improved convergence and re-convergence rate, i.e., a shorter howling period, as well as a lower average misalignment and a larger added stable gain compared to using either the NLMS or the PEM-NLMS algorithm alone. An objective evaluation using the perceptual evaluation of speech quality and the perceptual evaluation of audio quality measures shows that the proposed H-AFC scheme provides very high-quality speech and music signals. This has also been verified through a subjective listening experiment with N = 15 normal-hearing subjects using a multi-stimulus test with hidden reference and anchor, showing that the proposed H-AFC scheme results in a better perceptual quality than the state-of-the-art PEM-NLMS algorithm. 2018 Journal Article http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.11937/65785 10.1121/1.5020269 Acoustical Society of America restricted |
| spellingShingle | Nordholm, Sven Schepker, H. Tran, L. Doclo, S. Stability-controlled hybrid adaptive feedback cancellation scheme for hearing AIDS |
| title | Stability-controlled hybrid adaptive feedback cancellation scheme for hearing AIDS |
| title_full | Stability-controlled hybrid adaptive feedback cancellation scheme for hearing AIDS |
| title_fullStr | Stability-controlled hybrid adaptive feedback cancellation scheme for hearing AIDS |
| title_full_unstemmed | Stability-controlled hybrid adaptive feedback cancellation scheme for hearing AIDS |
| title_short | Stability-controlled hybrid adaptive feedback cancellation scheme for hearing AIDS |
| title_sort | stability-controlled hybrid adaptive feedback cancellation scheme for hearing aids |
| url | http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.11937/65785 |