EP1017253B1 - Blind-Trennung von Signalquellen für Hörhilfegeräte - Google Patents

Blind-Trennung von Signalquellen für Hörhilfegeräte Download PDF

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Publication number
EP1017253B1
EP1017253B1 EP99310611A EP99310611A EP1017253B1 EP 1017253 B1 EP1017253 B1 EP 1017253B1 EP 99310611 A EP99310611 A EP 99310611A EP 99310611 A EP99310611 A EP 99310611A EP 1017253 B1 EP1017253 B1 EP 1017253B1
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EP
European Patent Office
Prior art keywords
signal
input signals
unmixing
signals
microphones
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Revoked
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EP99310611A
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English (en)
French (fr)
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EP1017253A3 (de
EP1017253A2 (de
Inventor
Justinian Rosca
Christian Darken
Thomas Petsche
Inga Holube
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Sivantos GmbH
Siemens Corp
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Siemens Corp
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    • HELECTRICITY
    • H04ELECTRIC COMMUNICATION TECHNIQUE
    • H04RLOUDSPEAKERS, MICROPHONES, GRAMOPHONE PICK-UPS OR LIKE ACOUSTIC ELECTROMECHANICAL TRANSDUCERS; DEAF-AID SETS; PUBLIC ADDRESS SYSTEMS
    • H04R25/00Deaf-aid sets, i.e. electro-acoustic or electro-mechanical hearing aids; Electric tinnitus maskers providing an auditory perception
    • H04R25/40Arrangements for obtaining a desired directivity characteristic
    • H04R25/405Arrangements for obtaining a desired directivity characteristic by combining a plurality of transducers
    • HELECTRICITY
    • H04ELECTRIC COMMUNICATION TECHNIQUE
    • H04RLOUDSPEAKERS, MICROPHONES, GRAMOPHONE PICK-UPS OR LIKE ACOUSTIC ELECTROMECHANICAL TRANSDUCERS; DEAF-AID SETS; PUBLIC ADDRESS SYSTEMS
    • H04R25/00Deaf-aid sets, i.e. electro-acoustic or electro-mechanical hearing aids; Electric tinnitus maskers providing an auditory perception
    • H04R25/40Arrangements for obtaining a desired directivity characteristic
    • H04R25/407Circuits for combining signals of a plurality of transducers
    • HELECTRICITY
    • H04ELECTRIC COMMUNICATION TECHNIQUE
    • H04RLOUDSPEAKERS, MICROPHONES, GRAMOPHONE PICK-UPS OR LIKE ACOUSTIC ELECTROMECHANICAL TRANSDUCERS; DEAF-AID SETS; PUBLIC ADDRESS SYSTEMS
    • H04R2225/00Details of deaf aids covered by H04R25/00, not provided for in any of its subgroups
    • H04R2225/43Signal processing in hearing aids to enhance the speech intelligibility
    • HELECTRICITY
    • H04ELECTRIC COMMUNICATION TECHNIQUE
    • H04RLOUDSPEAKERS, MICROPHONES, GRAMOPHONE PICK-UPS OR LIKE ACOUSTIC ELECTROMECHANICAL TRANSDUCERS; DEAF-AID SETS; PUBLIC ADDRESS SYSTEMS
    • H04R25/00Deaf-aid sets, i.e. electro-acoustic or electro-mechanical hearing aids; Electric tinnitus maskers providing an auditory perception
    • H04R25/50Customised settings for obtaining desired overall acoustical characteristics
    • H04R25/505Customised settings for obtaining desired overall acoustical characteristics using digital signal processing
    • H04R25/507Customised settings for obtaining desired overall acoustical characteristics using digital signal processing implemented by neural network or fuzzy logic

Definitions

  • the present invention generally relates to electronic filtering for enhancing a desired signal component of a mixed signal, and more specifically to a method and apparatus for real-time unmixing (separation or deconvolving) of a desired signal from a mixture of independent signals, particularly useful, for example, in a hearing aid.
  • noise When one is listening to someone or something, "noise" or undesired signals that interfere with the voice or desired signal, are ubiquitous. People with hearing impairment are especially vulnerable to noise. Background conversations, interference from digital devices (mobile telephones), car, or other specific environment noises, can make it very difficult for a hearing impaired person to understand a desired speech signal.
  • a reduction in the noise level of a signal, coupled with an automatic focus on a desired signal component, can significantly improve the performance of an electronic voice processor, such as one used in an advanced hearing aid.
  • WO 97/11533 discloses a directional acoustic signal processor and EP 0 883 325 discloses a method and processor for processing sounds, suitable for use in association with a hearing aid, which maximizes the signal to noise ratio of a signal from a source in an on-beam direction.
  • hearing aids using digital signal processing have been introduced. They contain one or more microphones, analog to digital converters, digital signal processors, and speakers. Usually the digital signal processors divide the incoming signals into several frequency regions using filter banks. Within each of those regions, signal gain and dynamic compression parameters can be individually adjusted in accordance with the requirement for a particular user of the hearing aid, in an attempt to improve intelligibility. Additionally, digital signal processing algorithms for feedback reduction and noise reduction are available, however they have major limitations. For example, some of the disadvantages of the currently available algorithms for noise reduction are the limited improvement they obtain when speech and background noise are in the same frequency region, due to their inability to distinguish between speech and background noise.
  • BSS Blind Source Separation
  • An electronic filtering device for performing real-time unmixing of a signal desired to be recovered by a user of the device, where the desired signal emanates from one of a plurality of independent signal sources.
  • Two microphones positioned along a common axis develop first and second electrical input signals in response to reception by the microphones of acoustic signals from the plurality of independent signal sources.
  • the spatial position of the common axis of the microphones is controllable in real time by the user to align the common axis so it points in the direction of the source of the desired signal, thereby imparting an inherent directionality to the input signals.
  • An adaptive unmixing signal processor responsive to the input signals develops output signals wherein the desired signal is separated from the mixture signal.
  • a preprocessor is provided to enhance the inherent directionality of the input signals by establishing a relative time delay therebetween. Furthermore, the preprocessor may subject the enhanced input signals to a decorrelation processing before their application to the unmixing signal processor.
  • a selected output of the unmixing signal processor can be applied as an input to a speaker for reproduction, or can be further processed for signal enhancement by an additional processor before reproduction.
  • FIG. 1 illustrates in block diagram form an application of the invention for use in hearing aids.
  • a hearing aid 10 includes two microphones 12 and 14 for developing two input signals 1 and 2, respectively.
  • the microphones are mounted in the hearing aid such that a common axis of their positioning always extends substantially in the direction in which the wearer of the hearing aid looks when being attentive to a signal source such as a voice.
  • This microphone positioning imparts an inherent directionality to input signals 1 and 2. Since each microphone develops electrical signals representative of the acoustic waves received thereby from sound sources within it's operating range, each input signal may comprise a mixture of unknown signals from an unknown number of signal sources.
  • Input signals 1 and 2 are processed in three main stages.
  • the input signals are preprocessed for enhancing the inherent directionality already imparted thereto by their positioning.
  • the resulting signals are subjected to an unmixing processing (sometimes referred to as separation processing), which is designed to produce estimates of the original unknown signals picked-up by microphones 12 and 14.
  • the outputs of the unmixing processing are preferably postprocessed to produce the desired signal 22, which can then be applied to a speaker 24 of the hearing aid 10 for reproduction and presentation to a user.
  • preprocessing stage 16 begins with normalization of the raw input signals.
  • Automatic Gain Control is used to normalize input signals 1 and 2 to a [-1,+1] range.
  • preprocessing stage 16 in order to adapt a blind source separation (BSS) technique for use in a device as small as a hearing aid, and to have it operate in real-time, preprocessing stage 16 also provides at least the first, and preferably both of the following additional processing:
  • the window D comprised 16,000 samples.
  • the above described preprocessing facilitates the subsequent BSS processing to arrive at a solution in a shorter time than if the preprocessing was not provided, and furthermore, increases the probability that the BSS processing will arrive at a valid solution instead of a local minimum.
  • Figure 3 illustrates the principles of the operation of a BSS algorithm upon which the unmixing or separation of the desired component from the input signals is based.
  • the technique is called Blind Source Separation because it makes few assumptions about the type of signals present in the mixture.
  • BSS processing is intended to recover the set of n unknown source signals from a set of their mixtures, assuming that the n source signals are independent. More specifically, as shown in Figure 3 , if s is a vector of n sources, and x is a vector of m observations of those sources (i.e., the raw input signals from the m microphones), the goal of a BSS processor is to discover the m by n mixing matrix A:
  • the sources s (s 1 , s 2 ) and the environment-dependent mixing matrix A are unknown.
  • FIG. 4 illustrates a block diagram of the main components of a BSS processor 400.
  • BSS processor 400 comprises: an unmixing component 402 for recording and updating the state of the unmixing process defined by parameters W and v; a nonlinear component 404 for generating statistics used in the adaptation process; and an adaptation component 406 for computing changes in the values of the unmixing parameters, ⁇ W and ⁇ v.
  • the BSS processor 400 continuously adapts two state variables: the 2 by 2 unmixing matrix W, and the 2 by 1 bias vector b .
  • the nonlinear component 404 transforms the output of the system using an invertible mapping.
  • the objective of component 404 is to avoid processing very large numeric values of the outputs, which may be infinities from a computational point of view. This objective is carried out by processing statistically equivalent quantities, obtained after running the outputs z through the invertible mapping.
  • the adaptation component 406 determines changes in the unmixing parameters W and v: i.e., ⁇ W and ⁇ v.
  • the objective is to maximize the mutual information that the outputs y contain about the inputs x , as well known to those skilled in this technology, and as described, for example by A.J. Bell and T.J. Sejnowski in their article entitled "An information-maximization approach to blind separation and blind deconvolution" published in Neural Computation, 7:1129-1159, 1995, and as also described in Bell's US patent 5,706,402 .
  • a typical value for the learning rate ⁇ is 0.005.
  • unmixer 18 is the postprocessing step 20, wherein a determination is made of which output estimate of unmixer 18 is more likely to represent voice rather than noise, as well as a normalization of the power of the outputs by scaling them to the level of the input powers.
  • the output signal section can be based on multiple criteria using, for example, voice specific feature extraction and analysis, and/or dominant speaker detection, which can also be accomplished using feature extraction and analysis.
  • the BSS processing is applied for use in hearing aids.
  • the inputs to the system are given by two microphones which, with the present invention, can be situated very close to one another.
  • the present invention addresses the following problems:
  • teaching of the present invention can be extremely useful for interference cancellation, separation of one voice from a mixture of many voices ("cocktail party" problem), and for preprocessing sound mixtures for noise reduction in order to allow further processing of a desired sound signal. x . All such changes, modifications, variations and other uses and applications which do not depart from the teachings herein are deemed to be covered by this patent, which is limited only by the claims which follow as interpreted in light of the foregoing description.

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  • Health & Medical Sciences (AREA)
  • General Health & Medical Sciences (AREA)
  • Neurosurgery (AREA)
  • Otolaryngology (AREA)
  • Physics & Mathematics (AREA)
  • Engineering & Computer Science (AREA)
  • Acoustics & Sound (AREA)
  • Signal Processing (AREA)
  • Circuit For Audible Band Transducer (AREA)

Claims (14)

  1. Hörhilfegerät (10), umfassend eine elektronische Filtervorrichtung zum Ausführen einer Echtzeit-Entmischung eines Signals, von dem der Verwender des Geräts wünscht, dass es wiederhergestellt wird, wobei des gewünschte Signal aus einer aus einer Mehrzahl unabhängiger Signalquellen stammt, das Hörhilfegerät umfassend
    ein gemeinsames Gehäuse mit zwei darin angebrachten Mikrofonen (12, 14), wobei das gemeinsame Gehäuse bei Verwendung für gemeinsame Anordnung mit dem Ohr des Verwenders ausgelegt ist, und einen anpassbaren Signalentmischungsprozessor (18), wobei
    die zwei Mikrophone (12, 14) entlang einer gemeinsamen Achse angeordnet sind zum Entwickeln eines ersten und eines zweiten elektrischen Eingabesignals als Reaktion auf den Empfang durch die Mikrophone von akustischen Signalen aus der Mehrzahl unabhängiger Signalquellen, wobei die räumliche Position der gemeinsamen Achse der Mikrophone in Echtzeit steuerbar ist gemäß der Richtung, in welche der Verwender schaut, wenn er auf eine Signalquelle aufmerksam ist, um die gemeinsame Achse so auszurichten, dass sie im Wesentlichen durchgängig in die Richtung der Quelle des gewünschten Signals zeigt, wenn der Verwender in die Richtung des Signals schaut; und wobei
    der anpassbare Signalentmischungsprozessor (18) einen Blindquellen-Signalseparator umfasst, der auf die Eingabesignale reagiert zum Entwickeln von Ausgabesignalen, in welchen das gewünschte Signal getrennt vom Mischungssignal ist.
  2. Hörhilfegerät gemäß Anspruch 1, zudem umfassend einen Vorprozessor (16) zum Modofizieren der Eingabesignale, bevor sie den Signalentmischungsprozessor durchlaufen.
  3. Hörhilfegerät gemäß Anspruch 2, wobei der Vorprozessor (16) eine relative Verzögerung zwischen den Bestandteilen des Eingabesignals einführt.
  4. Hörhilfegerät gemäß Anspruch 2 oder 3, wobei der Vorprozessor (16) die Eingabesignale einer Entkorrelationsbearbeitung unterzieht.
  5. Hörhilfegerät gemäß Anspruch 1, zudem umfassend eine Nachprozessor (20), der auf die Ausgabesignale des Signalentmischungsprozessors reagiert zum Auswählen des gewünschten Signals zur Anwendung auf eine Signalwiedergabevorrichtung.
  6. Hörhilfegerät gemäß Anspruch 1, wobei der Blindquellen-Signalseparator (18) ein neurales Netzwerk umfasst zum Ausführen eines nicht überwachten Lernvorgangs, der so arbeitet, dass er die kombinierte Ausgangsentropie der Ausgangssignale maximiert.
  7. Verfahren zum Ausführen einer Echtzeit-Entmischung eines Signals, von dem ein Verwender wünscht, dass es wiederhergestellt wird, wobei des gewünschte Signal aus einer aus einer Mehrzahl unabhängiger Signalquellen stammt, das Verfahren umfassend die folgenden Schritte
    Anordnen zweier Mikrophone (12, 14) entlang einer gemeinsamen Achse zum Entwickeln eines ersten und eines zweiten Eingabesignals als Reaktion auf den Empfang durch die Mikrophone von akustischen Signalen aus der Mehrzahl unabhängiger Signalquellen, wobei das Anordnen so erfolgt, dass die gemeinsame Achse der Mikrophone in Echtzeit durch den Verwender steuerbar ist zum Ausrichten der gemeinsamen Achse so, dass sie im Wesentlichen durchgängig in die Richtung der Quelle des gewünschten Signals zeigt durch Anordnen der gemeinsamen Achse in der Nähe des Verwenders in einer Weise, dass sie in die Richtung zeigt, in die der Verwender schaut; und
    Unterwerfen der Eingangssignale einer anpassbaren Entmischungssignalbearbeitung durch Blindquellensignaltrennungsbearbeitung zum Entwickeln von Ausgabesignalen, wobei das gewünschte Signal vom Mischsignal getrennt wird.
  8. Verfahren gemäß Anspruch 7, wobei durch das Anordnen die gemeinsame Achse auf einem gemeinsamen Gehäuse angeordnet wird, welches sich am selben Ort wie das Ohr des Verwenders befinden soll.
  9. Verfahren gemäß Anspruch 7, zudem umfassend einen Vorbearbeitungsschritt zum Modifizieren der Eingangssignale, bevor es die Entmischungssignal-Bearbeitung durchläufen.
  10. Verfahren gemäß Anspruch 9, wobei der Vorbearbeitungsschritt eine relative Verzögerung zwischen den Bestandteilen des Eingabesignals einführt.
  11. Verfahren gemäß Anspruch 9 oder 10, wobei der Vorbearbeitungsschritt die relativ verzögerten Eingabesignale einer Entkorrelationsbearbeitung unterzieht.
  12. Verfahren gemäß Anspruch 11, wobei der Schritt der Entkorrelationsbearbeitung ausgeführt wird durch Diagonalisierung einer mit den relativ verzögerten Eingabesignalen gebildeten Korrelationsmatrix.
  13. Verfahren gemäß Anspruch 7, zudem umfassend einen Nachbearbeitungsschritt als Reaktion auf die Ausgabesignale des Signalentmischungsbearbeitungsschritts zum Auswählen des gewünschten Signals zur Anwendung auf eine Signalwiedergabevorrichtung.
  14. Verfahren gemäß Anspruch 7, wobei die Blindquellensignaltrennungsbearbeitung umfasst einen nicht überwachten Lernvorgang, der so arbeitet, dass er die kombinierte Ausgangsentropie der Ausgangssignale maximiert.
EP99310611A 1998-12-30 1999-12-24 Blind-Trennung von Signalquellen für Hörhilfegeräte Revoked EP1017253B1 (de)

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US22348598A 1998-12-30 1998-12-30
US223485 1998-12-30

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EP3849215A1 (de) 2020-01-10 2021-07-14 Sonova AG Duale drahtlose audiostromübertragung mit räumlicher diversität oder eigener sprachaufnahme
US11083031B1 (en) 2020-01-10 2021-08-03 Sonova Ag Bluetooth audio exchange with transmission diversity
US11134349B1 (en) 2020-03-09 2021-09-28 International Business Machines Corporation Hearing assistance device with smart audio focus control

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DE10351509B4 (de) * 2003-11-05 2015-01-08 Siemens Audiologische Technik Gmbh Hörgerät und Verfahren zur Adaption eines Hörgeräts unter Berücksichtigung der Kopfposition
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DK2077059T3 (da) 2006-10-10 2017-11-27 Sivantos Gmbh Fremgangsmåde til drift af en hørehjælpeindretning samt en hørehjælpeindretning
EP1912472A1 (de) * 2006-10-10 2008-04-16 Siemens Audiologische Technik GmbH Verfahren zum Betreiben einer Hörhilfe, sowie Hörhilfe
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JP5130298B2 (ja) * 2006-10-10 2013-01-30 シーメンス アウディオローギッシェ テヒニク ゲゼルシャフト ミット ベシュレンクテル ハフツング 補聴器の動作方法、および補聴器
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Publication number Priority date Publication date Assignee Title
EP3849215A1 (de) 2020-01-10 2021-07-14 Sonova AG Duale drahtlose audiostromübertragung mit räumlicher diversität oder eigener sprachaufnahme
US11083031B1 (en) 2020-01-10 2021-08-03 Sonova Ag Bluetooth audio exchange with transmission diversity
US11134350B2 (en) 2020-01-10 2021-09-28 Sonova Ag Dual wireless audio streams transmission allowing for spatial diversity or own voice pickup (OVPU)
US11134349B1 (en) 2020-03-09 2021-09-28 International Business Machines Corporation Hearing assistance device with smart audio focus control

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DK1017253T3 (da) 2013-02-11
EP1017253A3 (de) 2003-03-26
CN1261759A (zh) 2000-08-02
EP1017253A2 (de) 2000-07-05

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