Um Estimador de Envelope Temporal para Redução de Ruído em Implantes Cocleares

This work presents a new noise reduction technique for cochlear implants based on speech time-envelope estimates. Numerical simulations using an objective intelligibility criterion, corroborated by a psychoacoustic experiment with a cochlear implant user, indicate a consistent increase in the intelligibility in relation to raw contaminated speech signals as well as to Wiener filter processed signals. These observations are valid for signal to noise ratios (S NR) less than 10 dB. In addition, the intelligibility gain increases with the decrease of the SNR.