Hearing loss currently affects over 1.5 billion people globally, of whom 430 million have moderate or severe
hearing loss. This affects quality of life and therefore the use of hearing aids is absolutely necessary for some
people. Although significant progress has been made in hearing aid design, there are still user dissatisfactions
with commercially available hearing aids, particularly with regard to the occurrence of whistling and occlusion.
In this project, original algorithms with increased efficiency in reducing these annoying sounds were investigated
by combining active noise control (ANC), acoustic feedback cancellation (AFC) and machine learning (ML) techniques.
The proposed dissemination objectives were exceeded. Six conference papers and three journal papers were planned to
be published. 13 papers were published in prestigious national/international conferences (e.g. IEEE ISETC 2022,
IEEE ISSCS 2023, IEEE SSP 2023, EUSIPCO 2023, IEEE APSIPA ASC 2023, IEEE TELFOR 2024, IEEE ISWCS 2024).
Seven journal papers were also published (e.g. in Journal of Big Data (Q1), FI impact factor of 8.1,
IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security, impact factor 7.231 (Q1), IEEE Access (Q2) FI impact
factor of 3.476, IEEE TCAS-II Express Briefs (Q2), FI impact factor of 3.922)
The publications from this project have been ISI indexed in WoS as well as in other databases (IEEE Explore, Scopus,
DBLP and Google Scholar). The scientific impact is significant, the articles published so far within this project
have already received over 370 citations.
The international visibility of the team members involved in the project has increased. Collaborations have been made with teams from Romania, Canada, Australia, India, Kazakhstan, Kuwait, Jordan, Japan, and Taiwan (e.g. UPB, Romania, INRS-EMT, University of Quebec, Montreal, Canada, Curtin University, Australia, Posts and Telecommunications Institute of Technology, Hanoi, Vietnam, Sathyabama Institute of Science and Technology, Chennai, India, St. Joseph's College of Engineering, Chennai, India, R C Patel Institute of Technology, Shirpur, Vellore Institute of Technology, Vellore, India, American University of the Middle East, Kuwait and Yarmouk University, Jordan, Nazarbayev University, Kazakhstan, Tokyo Institute of Technology, Japan, National Ilan Unversity, Taiwan, etc.). The conditions have also been created for continued collaboration in the future with these international research groups.
