Patent ID: 7110951

Claim:
An audio signal processing system for enhancing speech signal intelligibility for the hearing impaired in the presence of a source of audio signals, system noise, ambient noise, program background noise, and particular hearing impairments, the system including an output signal amplifier, and at least one output speaker, comprising: a. a speech enhancement system having a speech processing unit and a speech signal bypass circuit, and further including: remote control and audio/video input signals connected to an input circuit, a central processing unit, an output audio circuit for connection to external amplifiers, an adaptive filter for suppression of system, ambient, and/or interfering background noise present in the input audio signal, and/or for compensating for specific hearing loss parameters for selected hearing impaired listeners, a hearing test system, an equalization/compensation system to optimize the audio signal for selected room acoustics and hearing impairment profiles of particular users, a speech recognition system to recognize spoken words, a lip reading computer vision system, an expert system to assist in the recognition of spoken words based on context, a speech synthesis system, wherein the central processing unit includes switching and control circuits for interconnecting the input circuit audio/visual input signals to the adaptive filter, the equalization/compensation circuit, the hearing test system, the speech recognition system, the lip reading expert system and the output circuits to provide user selected signal enhancement to improve the intelligibility of the audio signal for selected hearing impaired users and further wherein the source of audio signals is connected to the speech enhancement system which either processes the speech signal in the speech processing unit to enhance the intelligibility of the speech signals for the hearing impaired before connection to the output signal amplifier and one or more output speakers, or bypasses the audio signals directly to the output signal amplifier and one or more speakers, the bypass option and speech enhancement processing operations being under user control.