Author:

Keywords:

SISTA, Science & Technology, Technology, Acoustics, Engineering, Electrical & Electronic, Engineering, Binaural hearing aids, binaural cues, noise reduction, multi-channel Wiener filtering, COCHLEAR IMPLANT RECIPIENTS, SPEECH RECOGNITION, HEARING-AIDS, LOCALIZATION, ENHANCEMENT, ALGORITHMS, 0801 Artificial Intelligence and Image Processing, 0906 Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Speech-Language Pathology & Audiology, 4006 Communications engineering, 4602 Artificial intelligence, 4603 Computer vision and multimedia computation

Abstract:

© 2016 IEEE. A general binaural noise reduction system is considered that employs the multichannelWiener filter with partial noise estimation (MWF?) allowing for an explicit tradeoff between noise reduction and binaural noise cue preservation. In this paper, it is assumed that along with the general binaural system, a remote microphone signal with a high input signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) is available for inclusion in theMWF?. The use of this remote microphone signal with a high input SNR allows for a simultaneous increase in both noise reduction performance and preservation of the binaural noise cues. To further increase the performance, a modification to the partial noise estimation (PNE) variable, ?, is proposed which relies on exploiting the aforementioned trade-off by either constraining the output SNR or binaural noise cues to the same level before and after the addition of the remote microphone signal. The validity of the theoretical results are supplemented via simulations using a binaural setup with a single speech and noise source.