TY - GEN
T1 - Comparison of two binaural beamforming approaches for hearing aids
AU - Hadad, Elior
AU - Marquardt, Daniel
AU - Pu, Wenqiang
AU - Gannot, Sharon
AU - Doclo, Simon
AU - Luo, Zhi Quan
AU - Merks, Ivo
AU - Zhang, Tao
PY - 2017/6/16
Y1 - 2017/6/16
N2 - Beamforming algorithms in binaural hearing aids are crucial to improve speech understanding in background noise for hearing impaired persons. In this study, we compare and evaluate the performance of two recently proposed minimum variance (MV) beamforming approaches for binaural hearing aids. The binaural linearly constrained MV (BLCMV) beamformer applies linear constraints to maintain the target source and mitigate the interfering sources, taking into account the reverberant nature of sound propagation. The inequality constrained MV (ICMV) beamformer applies inequality constraints to maintain the target source and mitigate the interfering sources, utilizing estimates of the direction of arrivals (DOAs) of the target and interfering sources. The similarities and differences between these two approaches is discussed and the performance of both algorithms is evaluated using simulated data and using real-world recordings, particularly focusing on the robustness to estimation errors of the relative transfer functions (RTFs) and DOAs. The BLCMV achieves a good performance if the RTFs are accurately estimated while the ICMV shows a good robustness to DOA estimation errors.
AB - Beamforming algorithms in binaural hearing aids are crucial to improve speech understanding in background noise for hearing impaired persons. In this study, we compare and evaluate the performance of two recently proposed minimum variance (MV) beamforming approaches for binaural hearing aids. The binaural linearly constrained MV (BLCMV) beamformer applies linear constraints to maintain the target source and mitigate the interfering sources, taking into account the reverberant nature of sound propagation. The inequality constrained MV (ICMV) beamformer applies inequality constraints to maintain the target source and mitigate the interfering sources, utilizing estimates of the direction of arrivals (DOAs) of the target and interfering sources. The similarities and differences between these two approaches is discussed and the performance of both algorithms is evaluated using simulated data and using real-world recordings, particularly focusing on the robustness to estimation errors of the relative transfer functions (RTFs) and DOAs. The BLCMV achieves a good performance if the RTFs are accurately estimated while the ICMV shows a good robustness to DOA estimation errors.
KW - Binaural signal processing
KW - LCMV
KW - acoustic beamforming
KW - binaural hearing aids
KW - noise reduction
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85023756462&partnerID=8YFLogxK
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/citedby.url?scp=85023756462&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1109/ICASSP.2017.7952153
DO - 10.1109/ICASSP.2017.7952153
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:85023756462
T3 - ICASSP, IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing - Proceedings
SP - 236
EP - 240
BT - 2017 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing, ICASSP 2017 - Proceedings
PB - Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc.
T2 - 2017 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing, ICASSP 2017
Y2 - 5 March 2017 through 9 March 2017
ER -
