Intelligent Hearing Protection and Communication System with Speech Enhancement and Situational Awareness

In the U.S. military rotary-wing aviation setting such as heavy lift helicopters, pilots are exposed to severe cabin noise produced by the aircraft. Noise level in these helicopters exceeding safe limits assessed in accordance with limits set in DODI 6055.12 may lead to degraded speech intelligibility and has the potential for permanent hearing loss. Most of current technologies indiscriminately block or cancel ambient noises, and the situational awareness is sacrificed. In this proposal, Intelligent Automation, Inc. proposes an intelligent hearing protection and communication system with speech intelligibility and SA enhancements. The key innovation of the proposed approach is to selectively cancel the target noise from the environmental acoustic signal while maintaining situational awareness, and enhance the uplink speech signal of the pilots in order to improve speech intelligibility.