Description
Book SynopsisThe perception of one's own voice is distorted when telephoning with headsets, or wearing hearing aids. The reason for this is the so-called occlusion effect, which occurs when ear canals are completely or partially closed by the headset or hearing aid. The occlusion causes amplification at low frequencies, and attenuation at high frequencies of one's own voice. The unnatural perception of one's own voice and of noise caused by chewing and swallowing are among the most common complaints of users. Furthermore, environmental noise might impair perception. In this thesis, both the unnatural perception of one's own voice and the disturbance by environmental noise are tackled by a novel signal processing approach. The proposed solution solves the problem of the occlusion effect by actively emitting a compensation signal through the integrated loudspeaker. The approach is called Occlusion Effect Cancellation (OEC) and significantly improves the perception of one's own voice and of the aco