Hearing Aid Audio Forecasting for Low-Latency Noise Suppression
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Solution Overview
Problem
Existing audio device systems, particularly hearing aids, struggle with noise suppression and processing delays, leading to suboptimal hearing loss compensation and sound quality.
Innovation Solution
A method involving audio signal encoding, latent encoding manipulation, forecasting, and decoding to predict future audio signals, distributed across devices with computational resources to minimize processing delays and enhance noise suppression and speech intelligibility.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Reliability
If noise suppression processing is performed in traditional hearing aid systems, then sound quality is improved, but processing delays increase
Solution Approach 1:
The system performs preliminary encoding of the audio signal into a compressed latent representation, which captures the essential features needed for noise suppression. This preliminary action reduces the data volume that needs to be processed, enabling faster subsequent processing while maintaining sound quality.
Solution Approach 2:
The patent replaces traditional mechanical signal processing with a neural network-based system that operates in the latent space. This substitution enables more efficient noise suppression processing that reduces processing delays while maintaining or improving sound quality through learned representations.
2Productivity
If computational resources are increased within the audio device, then processing speed is improved, but device complexity and size increase
Solution Approach 1:
The system extracts only the essential features of the audio signal into a compressed latent representation, removing unnecessary data that would require extensive processing. This extraction enables faster processing with reduced computational resources, avoiding the need for increased device complexity.
Solution Approach 2:
The patent transforms the audio signal from the time domain to a latent feature space, changing the representation parameters to be more amenable to efficient processing. This parameter transformation reduces the computational burden while maintaining processing speed and quality.
3Device complexity
If traditional signal processing methods are used, then device simplicity is maintained, but noise suppression effectiveness decreases
Solution Approach 1:
The patent replaces traditional mechanical signal processing methods with neural network-based processing in the latent space. This substitution achieves superior noise suppression effectiveness while maintaining relative device simplicity by working with compressed representations rather than full-bandwidth signals.
Solution Approach 2:
The system moves from processing audio signals in the traditional time-frequency domain to a latent feature space, adding a new dimensional perspective. This dimensional transformation enables more effective noise suppression by capturing semantic features that are not apparent in traditional processing domains.
Data Source
AI summary
A method (500) of operating a hearing aid system in order to provide at least one of improved noise reduction and speech intelligibility and a hearing aid system adapted to carry out the method.