Binaural Mask-Informed Speech Enhancement for Hearing AIDS with Head Tracking

Moore, Alastair H.; Lightburn, Leo; Xue, Wei; Naylor, Patrick A.; Brookes, Mike

doi:10.1109/iwaenc.2018.8521361

Cited by 12 publications

(16 citation statements)

References 23 publications

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“…In the proposed methods, the Wiener mask is applied to the signal, which is presented in the spatial and SH domains, as well as in the time-frequency domain. While some works have been published that pursued this research direction [22], [26], [27], these methods are not well established, so we will expand here. As presented in the introduction, various approaches for the enhancement of spatial audio signals have been proposed, while this paper focuses on approaches that require no, or very limited, a priori information on the signals, and only apply standard methods for SNR estimation.…”

Section: Wiener Masking Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…After representing a d nm (t) and a u nm (t) in the time-frequency domain by applying the STFT (with a Hanning window of length 512 samples, 50 % overlap, FFT of length 512 and sampling frequency of 16 kHz), the processing methods from Section III were applied by using the instantaneous estimation of the SNR (Eqs. (17), (22) and (32)). Binaural signals were then computed by using the Cologne HRTF compilation of the Neumann KU-100 [42].…”

Section: A Methodologymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Motivated by [22], this method uses beamforming and a timefrequency mask in order to preserve the desired signal at the source direction only. This method is suggested as a lower-end reference to the TFSH mask and the TFS mask.…”

Section: Beamforming Followed By Maskingmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…This assumption may not hold in case of a reverberant environment. To overcome this limitation, a more advanced method [22] uses beamforming and applies time-frequency masking on the binaural signals. With this approach, the undesired signal components arriving from the desired signal's direction can be attenuated.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In this paper, methods that aim to preserve the entire desired sound field, using time-frequency masking were investigated. These include: (i) the SH mask approach from [26], which is extended to the time-frequency domain; (ii) the second approach outlined in [27], which is based on a spatial time-frequency mask; and (iii) a third method, chosen as a low-end reference and motivated by [22], based on a single beamformer with a time-frequency mask. The focus in the paper on maskingbased methods stems from the simplicity of application of this approach.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 4 more Smart Citations

Speech Enhancement Using Masking for Binaural Reproduction of Ambisonics Signals

Lugasi

Rafaely

2020

IEEE/ACM Trans. Audio Speech Lang. Process.

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Speech enhancement in a single channel has been well studied in the literature in applications such as speech communication systems. However, in emerging applications such as virtual reality and spatial audio, in addition to attenuating undesired signals, the ability to preserve the spatial information of the desired signal captured in a noisy environment is of great importance. Nevertheless, there are only a few studies in the literature that propose solutions to this challenge. Most of these studies present solutions that attenuate the undesired signals, while preserving only limited spatial information regarding the desired signal, such as the direction of arrival (DOA). Methods that preserve complete spatial information have only recently been suggested, and have not been studied comprehensively. In this paper, two such methods based on time-frequency masking are investigated with the aim of attenuating the undesired signal, while preserving the spatial components of the desired signal. The first is referred to as spatial masking and is based on masking in the plane wave density (PWD) domain, and the second on masking in the spherical harmonics (SH) domain. The two methods are compared with a reference method, based on beamforming followed by single-channel time-frequency masking. Objective analysis and two listening tests were conducted in order to evaluate the performance of these methods for speech enhancement. It was shown that the spatial masking based method better preserves the desired component of the sound field, while the performance of the SH based method more strongly depends on the sources' distances. On the other hand, the SH based method better preserves the DOA of the residual noise, while the DOA of the residual noise under the spatial masking based method is strongly affected by the undesired signal.

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Section: Wiener Masking Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: A Methodologymentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Beamforming Followed By Maskingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 3 more Smart Citations

Speech Enhancement Using Masking for Binaural Reproduction of Ambisonics Signals

Lugasi

Rafaely

2020

IEEE/ACM Trans. Audio Speech Lang. Process.

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Hörstörungen und Hörgeräte

Hohmann¹,

Kollmeier²,

Grimm³

2021

Handbuch Der Audiotechnik

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Spatial audio signal processing for binaural reproduction of recorded acoustic scenes – review and challenges

Rafaely

Tourbabin²,

Habets³

et al. 2022

Acta Acust.

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Spatial audio has been studied for several decades, but has seen much renewed interest recently due to advances in both software and hardware for capture and playback, and the emergence of applications such as virtual reality and augmented reality. This renewed interest has led to the investment of increasing efforts in developing signal processing algorithms for spatial audio, both for capture and for playback. In particular, due to the popularity of headphones and earphones, many spatial audio signal processing methods have dealt with binaural reproduction based on headphone listening. Among these new developments, processing spatial audio signals recorded in real environments using microphone arrays plays an important role. Following this emerging activity, this paper aims to provide a scientific review of recent developments and an outlook for future challenges. This review also proposes a generalized framework for describing spatial audio signal processing for the binaural reproduction of recorded sound. This framework helps to understand the collective progress of the research community, and to identify gaps for future research. It is composed of five main blocks, namely: the acoustic scene, recording, processing, reproduction, and perception and evaluation. First, each block is briefly presented, and then, a comprehensive review of the processing block is provided. This includes topics from simple binaural recording to Ambisonics and perceptually motivated approaches, which focus on careful array configuration and design. Beamforming and parametric-based processing afford more flexible designs and shift the focus to processing and modeling of the sound field. Then, emerging machine- and deep-learning approaches, which take a further step towards flexibility in design, are described. Finally, specific methods for signal transformations such as rotation, translation and enhancement, enabling additional flexibility in reproduction and improvement in the quality of the binaural signal, are presented. The review concludes by highlighting directions for future research.

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Binaural Mask-Informed Speech Enhancement for Hearing AIDS with Head Tracking

Cited by 12 publications

References 23 publications

Speech Enhancement Using Masking for Binaural Reproduction of Ambisonics Signals

Speech Enhancement Using Masking for Binaural Reproduction of Ambisonics Signals

Hörstörungen und Hörgeräte

Spatial audio signal processing for binaural reproduction of recorded acoustic scenes – review and challenges

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