Intelligibility in Noise of Three LPC (Linear Predictive Coders) Voice Channels with Active Noise Reduction Headsets

摘要

Voice communications processed by Linear Predictive Coders (LPC) are vulnerable to degradation by noise. An earlier study demonstrated that the major effect occurs at the listener. Possible mechanisms for this effect range from poor LPC speech quality to the apparent ease of masking LPC speech by noise. The intelligibility of analog systems is increased with improved signal-to-noise ratios at the ear of the listener. The previous study used state-of-the-art communications headsets with passive sound attenuation. The amount of attenuation provided by these headsets has reached a practical limit, consequently the speech-to-noise ratio cannot be increased for wearable devices. Improvements in speech intelligibility provided by the enhanced and high quality LPC vocoders have not eliminated the problem. A prototype Active Noise Reduction (ANR) headset used with the LPC vocoder systems provided active sound attenuation in addition to the passive attenuation of the headset and resulted in reduced noise at the ear. This reduction improved the speech-to-noise ratio which led to improved intelligibility. Current versions of active noise reduction systems have a high potential for markedly reducing the noise masking problem with the vocoders. State-of-the-art active noise reduction has been proven in laboratory and flight tests. This technology should be applied to these vocoder systems and verified in flight demonstrations in the future. Keywords: Low bit rate. (edc)