SpikeAid: A Streaming Spiking Hearing Aid Framework for Joint Noise Reduction and Wide Dynamic Range Compression

Abstract

Modern hearing aids combine noise reduction (NR) with wide dynamic range compression (WDRC) to suppress background interference while compensating for the reduced auditory dynamic range associated with hearing loss. Conventional systems typically process NR and WDRC as separate stages, although the output of NR directly affects the signal levels and envelopes that determine subsequent compression. Recent end-to-end neural approaches can jointly optimize these processes, but their dense computation remains challenging for always-on hearing aids. In this work, we propose SpikeAid, a causal end-to-end spiking neural network (SNN) framework for joint NR and WDRC. SpikeAid consists of an NR-Net that constructs complementary speech and noise representations and a WDRC-Net that estimates the corresponding branch gains, with both components jointly optimized according to the final hearing aid objective. To capture the multiscale temporal structures required by joint NR and WDRC in a computationally efficient manner, we further introduce the Delayed Resonate-and-fire Neuron (DRN), which incorporates bio-inspired heterogeneous dendritic delays and resonating dynamics. Experimental results on the hearing aid task show that SpikeAid improves key objective metrics over cascaded processing and outperforms existing spiking speech-processing baselines. Evaluation on the public Intel Neuromorphic Deep Noise Suppression (N-DNS) Challenge further demonstrates state-of-the-art neuromorphic speech-denoising performance with DRN. Finally, we designed an FPGA-based neuromorphic hardware system for efficient deployment of SpikeAid, where it achieves over two orders of magnitude higher energy efficiency than conventional CPU/GPU implementations, demonstrating its potential for energy-efficient hearing aid applications.