Scientific Article

Subjective quality evaluation of personalized own voice reconstruction systems

¹ Fraunhofer Institute for Digital Media Technology IDMT, Oldenburg Branch for Hearing, Speech and Audio Technology HSA, Oldenburg, Germany
² Carl von Ossietzky Universität Oldenburg, Department of Medical Physics and Acoustics and Cluster of Excellence Hearing4all, Oldenburg, Germany

^* Corresponding author: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

Received: 30 September 2025
Accepted: 23 February 2026

Abstract

Own voice pickup technology for hearable devices facilitates communication in noisy environments. Own voice reconstruction (OVR) systems enhance the quality and intelligibility of the recorded noisy own voice signals. Since disturbances affecting the recorded own voice signals depend on individual factors, personalized OVR systems have the potential to outperform generic OVR systems. In this paper, we propose personalizing OVR systems through data augmentation and fine-tuning, comparing them to their generic counterparts. We investigate the influence of personalization on speech quality assessed by objective metrics and conduct a subjective listening test to evaluate quality under various conditions. In addition, we assess the prediction accuracy of the objective metrics by comparing predicted quality with subjectively measured quality. Our findings suggest that personalized OVR provides benefits over generic OVR for some talkers only. Our results also indicate that performance comparisons between systems are not always accurately predicted by objective metrics. In particular, certain disturbances lead to a consistent overestimation of quality compared to actual subjective ratings.