We propose a new approach to personal identification using derived vectorcardiogram (dVCG). The dVCG was calculated from recorded ECG using inverse Dower transform. Twenty-one features were extracted from the resulting dVCG. To analyze the effect of each feature and to improve efficiency while maintaining the performance, we performed feature selection using the Relief-F algorithm using these 21 features. Each set of the eight highest ranked features and all 21 features were used in SVM learning and in tests, respectively. The classification accuracy using the entire feature set was 99.53 %. However, using only the eight highest ranked features, the classification accuracy was 99.07 %, indicating only a 0.46 % decrease in accuracy compared with the accuracy achieved using the entire feature set. Using only the eight highest ranked features, the conventional ECG method resulted in a 93 % recognition rate, whereas our method achieved >99 % recognition rate, over 6 % higher than the conventional ECG method. Our experiments show that it is possible to perform a personal identification using only eight features extracted from the dVCG.

Digital hearing aid users often complain of difficulty in understanding speech in the presence of background noise. To improve speech perception in a noisy environment, various speech enhancement algorithms have been applied in digital hearing aids. In this study, a speech enhancement algorithm using modified spectral subtraction and companding is proposed for digital hearing aids. We adjusted the biases of the estimated noise spectrum, based on a subtraction factor, to decrease the residual noise. Companding was applied to the channel of the formant frequency based on the speech presence indicator to enhance the formant. Noise suppression was achieved while retaining weak speech components and avoiding the residual noise phenomena. Objective and subjective evaluation under various environmental conditions confirmed the improvement due to the proposed algorithm. We tested segmental SNR and Log Likelihood Ratio (LLR), which have higher correlation with subjective measures. Segmental SNR has the highest and LLR the lowest correlation of the methods tested. In addition, we confirmed by spectrogram that the proposed method significantly reduced the residual noise and enhanced the formants. A mean opinion score that represented the global perception score was tested; this produced the highest quality speech using the proposed method. The results show that the proposed speech enhancement algorithm is beneficial for hearing aid users in noisy environments.