| Noisy
environments such as a construction site or the floor of a factory can
cause damage to one’s hearing and can hinder communication with
others. Safety regulations often require the use of ear plugs or
muffling headphones to protect one’s hearing. This does not allow
for efficient communication with others, which becomes its own safety
hazard. |
| The solution to this problem is to provide a
means of noise cancellation and speech enhancement, which will protect
the user from loud noise and allow speech to be clearly
heard. To accomplish this, a set of headphones with the ability
to provide both passive and active noise cancellation will be
programmed with a speech enhancement algorithm that will estimate the
noise signal from the noisy environment. This noise estimation
will produce an estimated speech output to speaker of the headphones,
restoring the users ability to communicate with someone else despite
the noisy environment. |
 Speech Enhancement Flow Diagram |
| This solution will require a pair of headphones that are capable of providing passive noise cancellation, microphones that will acquire the noisy signal for active noise cancellation and speech enhancement implementation, and a digital signal processor (DSP) evaluation board for programming the speech enhancement and active noise cancellation algorithms. |