Cochlear implants are to sail for the rehabilitation of deep and totaldeafness. They provide stimulation of the auditory nerve by placing electrodesin the cochlea. Various studies have been established to improve thespeech intelligibility in noise in the patient of this device. Bilateral andbinaural techniques allow reproducing a binaural hearing, since both earsare simulated (as for normal hearing people). Thus localization and theperception of the surrounding sounds are improved from a monauralimplantation. However, the recognition of the words capabilities are limitedvery quickly in the presence of noise.We developed noise reduction techniquesto increase the performance of recognition. Improvements of 10% to 15%depending on the conditions were observed. Nevertheless, if the perception isenhanced by algorithms, they focus on a direction, and thus the location isthen reduced at the corner of localization. Then, a second study was madeto measure the effect of localization algorithms. Thus, the beamformer givesthe best results of understanding but the less good location. The re-injectionof a percentage of the input to the output signal helped offset the loss of thelocation without damaging the intelligibility.The result of these two experiments shows that it takes a compromisebetween perception and sound localization for best performance.
Interest of algorithms for noise reduction in cochlear implants : binaural application