Binaural Noise Reduction Algorithms for Hearing Aids That Preserve Interaural Time Delay Cues

Abstract

Binaural hearing aids use microphone inputs from both the left and right hearing aid to generate an output for each ear. On the other hand, a monaural hearing aid generates an output by processing only its own microphone inputs. This correspondence presents a binaural extension of a monaural multichannel noise reduction algorithm for hearing aids based on Wiener filtering. In addition to significantly suppressing the noise interference, the algorithm preserves the interaural time delay (ITD) cues of the speech component, thus allowing the user to correctly localize the speech source. Unfortunately, binaural multichannel Wiener filtering distorts the ITD cues of the noise source. By adding a parameter to the cost function the amount of noise reduction performed by the algorithm can be controlled, and traded off for the preservation of the noise ITD cues