Tutorial article on cochlear implants that appeared in the IEEE Signal Processing Magazine, pages 101-130, September 1998.
Note: A follow-up article covering recent (since 1998) developments was published in the book Cochlear and Brainstem Implants and can be downloaded from here.
Introduction to cochlear implants
Philipos C. Loizou
[Download article (13 MB)]
For centuries, people believed that only a miracle could restore hearing to the deaf. It was not until forty years ago that scientists first attempted to restore normal hearing to the deaf by electrical stimulation of the auditory nerve. The first experiments were discouraging as the patients reported that speech was unintelligible. However, as researchers kept investigating different techniques for delivering electrical stimuli to the auditory nerve, the auditory sensations elicited by electrical stimulation gradually came closer to sounding more like normal speech. Today, a prosthetic device, called cochlear implant, can be implanted in the inner ear and can restore partial hearing to profoundly deaf people. Some individuals with implants can now communicate without lip-reading or signing, and some can communicate over the telephone. The success of cochlear implants can be attributed to the combined efforts of scientists from various disciplines including bioengineering, physiology, otolaryngology, speech science, and signal processing. Each of these disciplines contributed to various aspects of the design of cochlear prostheses. Signal processing, in particular, played an important role in the development of different techniques for deriving electrical stimuli from the speech signal. Designers of cochlear prosthesis were faced with the challenge of developing signal processing techniques that would mimic the function of a normal cochlea. The purpose of this article is to present an overview of various signal processing techniques that have been used for cochlear prosthesis over the past 25 years. The signal processing strategies described below will be only a subset of the many that have been developed for cochlear prosthesis. Information on other signal processing strategies may be found in the excellent review by Wilson [1] as well as in [2][3][4].
1 Background
The present section reviews background material necessary for understanding cochlear prosthesis. The first section gives a brief overview of the type of information contained in the acoustic signal and its relation to speech perception. The following
sections briefly describe how the auditory system works, how it analyzes the speech signal and what causes hearing loss. An understanding of how our auditory system works is central to the development of a successful cochlear implant. After all, it is important to know how a normal auditory system functions before we can fix a system that is damaged. 1.1 The speech signal The designers of cochlear prosthesis need to know what information in the speech signal is perceptually important. This information needs to be preserved in order for the patient to be able to hear speech that is intelligible. This section reviews some fundamental elements of the speech signal. According to the source-filter model of speech production [5][6], the speech signal can be considered to be the output of a linear system. Depending on the type of input excitation (source), two classes of speech sounds are produced, voiced and unvoiced. If the input excitation is noise, then unvoiced sounds like /s/, /t/, etc. are produced, and if the input excitation is periodic then voiced sounds like /a/, /i/, etc., are produced. In the unvoiced case, noise is generated either by forcing air through a narrow constriction (e.g., production of /f/) or by building air pressure behind an obstruction and then suddenly releasing that pressure (e.g., production of /t/). In contrast, the excitation used to produce voiced sounds is periodic and is generated by the vibrating vocal cords. The frequency of the voiced excitation is commonly referred to as the fundamental frequency (F0 ). The vocal tract shape, defined in terms of tongue, velum, lip and jaw position, acts like a "filter" that filters the excitation to produce the speech signal. The frequency response of the filter has different spectral characteristics depending on the shape of the vocal tract. The broad spectral peaks in the spectrum are the resonances of the vocal tract and are commonly referred to as formants. Figure 1 shows for example the formants of the vowel /eh/ (as in "head"). The frequencies of the first three formants (denoted as F1, F2, and F3) contain sufficient information for the recognition of vowels as well as other voiced sounds. Formant movements have also been found to be extremely important for the perception of unvoiced sounds (i.e., consonants) (e.g., [7][6]). In summary, the formants carry some information about the speech signal, and because of that some of the early cochlear implant devices conveyed formant information to the electrodes.