CTO Project  "Objective Measures for Quality"

Product Manager: Dr. Rainer Huber, HörTech Oldenburg


Topic:

Development of objective quality measures for audio, speech and hearing device signal processing

Outline:

It is no longer science fiction, but reality: The subjectively perceived transmission quality of an audio signal (e.g. speech transmission via mobile phones or musical signals via hearing aids) must no longer be achieved by tedious testperson interviews. Quality can now be objectively determined by computers. This computation is made possible by a hearing model, for instance the "Oldenburg Perception Model", which quantitatively simulates signal processing of the ear for normal and impaired listeners. "Using the PEMO-Q method, which was developed during research at our university, hearing aid developers can estimate how good or bad a hearing aid will sound as early as the planning stage," explains Prof.Dr.Dr. Birger Kollmeier the application possibilities of this development. "Due to great interest shown by the industry, we have now made a product out of it."  Dr. Rainer Huber is the Product Manager, who worked on this procedure during his doctoral thesis at the University of Oldenburg. "A particular challenge is customizing this measure to individual hearing impaired persons," he asserts. Further developments include a project commissioned by an international consortium of the 6 most important hearing aid manufacturers for HörTech and its partners Ciad and TNO. "Our goal is to develop a standardizable, usable objective measure for quality for the entire hearing aid branch which can be implemented for normal and impaired listeners at the same time," states Huber.