Consonant-emphasis Method Incorporating Robust Consonant-section Detection to Improve Intelligibility of Bone-conducted speech

A consonant-emphasis (CE) method was proposed to improve the word intelligibility of presented speech by using bone-conducted (BC) headphones. However, the consonant-section detection (CSD) performance of this method is not robust against certain consonants. Therefore, a CE method with robust CSD is necessary for presented BC speech. We focused on improving the word intelligibility of presented BC speech in noisy environments and propose a CE method with robust CSD that combines the detection processes of voiced and unvoiced consonant sections. The evaluation of CSD procedures showed that more robust CSD procedure outperformed those of the conventional CE method as well as voiced CSD only and unvoiced CSD only. Word-intelligibility tests were also conducted on presented BC speech in noisy environments to compare the proposed and conventional methods, and the proposed method significantly improved word intelligibility over these conventional methods at a noise level of 75 dB.