Incorporating relative transfer function preservation into the binaural multi-channel wiener filter for hearing aids

Daniel Marquardt, Elior Hadad, Sharon Gannot, Simon Doclo

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

4 Scopus citations

Abstract

Besides noise reduction, an important objective of binaural speech enhancement algorithms is the preservation of the binaural cues of all sound sources. For the desired speech source and an interfering source, e.g., competing speaker, this can be achieved by preserving their relative transfer functions (RTFs). It has been shown that the binaural multi-channel Wiener filter (MWF) preserves the RTF of the desired speech source, but typically distorts the RTF of the interfering source. To this end, in this paper we propose an extension of the binaural MWF, i.e. The binaural MWF with RTF preservation (MWF-RTF) aiming to preserve the RTF of the interfering source. Analytical expressions for the performance of the binaural MWF and the MWF-RTF in terms of noise reduction and binaural cue preservation are derived, using which their performance is thoroughly compared. Simulation results using binaural behind-the-ear impulse responses measured in a reverberant environment validate the derived analytical expressions, showing that the MWF-RTF yields a better performance than the binaural MWF in terms of the signal-to-interference ratio and binaural cue preservation of the interfering source, while the overall noise reduction performance is slightly degraded.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publication2016 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing, ICASSP 2016 - Proceedings
PublisherInstitute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc.
Pages6500-6504
Number of pages5
ISBN (Electronic)9781479999880
DOIs
StatePublished - 18 May 2016
Event41st IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing, ICASSP 2016 - Shanghai, China
Duration: 20 Mar 201625 Mar 2016

Publication series

NameICASSP, IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing - Proceedings
Volume2016-May
ISSN (Print)1520-6149

Conference

Conference41st IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing, ICASSP 2016
Country/TerritoryChina
CityShanghai
Period20/03/1625/03/16

Bibliographical note

Publisher Copyright:
© 2016 IEEE.

Funding

This work was supported in part by a Grant from the German-Israeli Foundation for Scientific Research and Development, a joint Lower Saxony-Israeli Project financially supported by the State of Lower Saxony, Germany and the Cluster of Excellence 1077 "Hearing4All", funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG).

FundersFunder number
State of Lower Saxony
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft
German-Israeli Foundation for Scientific Research and Development

    Keywords

    • Hearing aids
    • binaural cues
    • multi-channel Wiener filter
    • noise reduction
    • relative transfer function

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