MBI-Net: A Non-Intrusive Multi-Branched Speech Intelligibility Prediction Model for Hearing Aids
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Improving the user's hearing ability to understand speech in noisy environments is critical to the development of hearing aid (HA) devices. For this, it is important to derive a metric that can fairly predict speech intelligibility for HA users. A straightforward approach is to conduct a subjective listening test and use the test results as an evaluation metric. However, conducting large-scale listening tests is time-consuming and expensive. Therefore, several evaluation metrics were derived as surrogates for subjective listening test results. In this study, we propose a multi-branched speech intelligibility prediction model (MBI-Net), for predicting the subjective intelligibility scores of HA users. MBI-Net consists of two branches of models, with each branch consisting of a hearing loss model, a cross-domain feature extraction module, and a speech intelligibility prediction model, to process speech signals from one channel. The outputs of the two branches are fused through a linear layer to obtain predicted speech intelligibility scores. Experimental results confirm the effectiveness of MBI-Net, which produces higher prediction scores than the baseline system in Track 1 and Track 2 on the Clarity Prediction Challenge 2022 dataset.
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