Individualized Hear-through For Acoustic Transparency Using PCA-Based Sound Pressure Estimation At The Eardrum

The hear-through functionality on hearing devices, which allows hearing equivalent to the open-ear while providing the possibility to modify the sound pressure at the eardrum in a desired manner, has drawn great attention from researchers in recent years. To this end, the output of the device is processed by means of an equalization filter, such that the transfer function between external sound sources and the eardrum is equivalent for the open-ear and the aided condition with the device in the ear. To achieve an ideal performance, the equalization filter design assumes the exact knowledge of all the relevant acoustic transfer functions. A particular challenge is the transfer function between the hearing device receiver and the eardrum, which is difficult to obtain in practice as it requires additional probe-tube measurements. In this work, we address this issue by proposing an individualized hear-through equalization filter design that leverages the measurement of the so-called secondary path to predict the sound pressure at the eardrum. Experimental results using real-ear measured transfer functions confirm that the proposed method achieves a good sound quality compared to the open-ear while outperforming filter designs that do not leverage the proposed estimator.