NIH: Open Design Tools for Speech Signal Processing (R01)

Open Design Tools for Speech Signal Processing has the below purposes and activities of interest encouraged under this announcement:

Opportunity purpose

• Develop novel acoustic signal processing algorithms for speech enhancement that employ the substantially greater amounts of computing power likely to be available in future generations of hearing aids, cochlear implants, personal sound processors, and consumer electronic devices.
• Propose research studies that extend experimental protocols beyond the range of acoustic psychophysical research studies widely performed today. 
• Design of algorithms and research studies that validate the potential benefits from these novel approaches to acoustic signal processing.
•  Studies that employ substantial computing power are encouraged in order to provide publications in the peer-reviewed literature that will inform efforts to develop real-time speech enhancement technologies for use in hearing aids, cochlear implants, personal sound processors, and consumer electronic devices.

Activities encouraged under this FOA include, but are not limited to, research that leads to development of:

• A comprehensive system that includes all functions widely recognized as essential features for a hearing aid, such as acoustic feedback cancellation and multiband amplitude compression. These functions should be provided as both source code and a compiled, binary image that can be run on various target platforms to support research studies of hearing aid signal processing.
• Function libraries that support areas of active research for speech signal processing, such as algorithms for various forms of speech enhancement, noise reduction, dynamic gain adjustment, frequency lowering, and other types of acoustic processing, which can be linked into the comprehensive system noted above.
• Validation procedures that  demonstrate proper operation of functions in the code library as originally written, and to support future efforts to port software to new hardware, optimize specific sections of code, or develop alternative processing algorithms. Performance benchmarks will be needed to quantify important differences between alternate implementations of similar functions.
• A variety of system architectures may be studied to validate different operating modes such as very short audio latency with restricted amounts of processing vs. relatively long latencies that allow more comprehensive processing algorithms to operate. Audio latency, e.g. the time delay between presentation of a raw sound at the microphone input and the processed variant at a speaker, will require careful consideration throughout the design and development activities.