Real-Time Automatic Tuning of Noise Suppression Algorithms for Cochlear Implant Applications

The performance of cochlear implants deteriorates in noisy environments compared to quiet conditions. This paper presents an adaptive cochlear implant system, which is capable of classifying the background noise environment in real time for the purpose of adjusting or tuning its noise suppression algorithm to that environment. The tuning is done automatically with no user intervention. Five objective quality measures are used to show the superiority of this adaptive system compared to a conventional fixed noise-suppression system. Steps taken to achieve the real-time implementation of the entire system, incorporating both the cochlear implant speech processing and the background noise suppression, on a portable PDA research platform are presented along with the timing results.