Extension of the multi-channel Wiener filter with ITD cues for noise reduction in binaural hearing aids

Doclo, Simon; Dong, Renjie; Klasen, Thomas; Wouters, Jan; Haykin, Simon; Moonen, Marc

doi:10.1109/aspaa.2005.1540171

Cited by 27 publications

(24 citation statements)

References 10 publications

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“…The second term in the distortion (18) can thus be written as It corresponds to the distortion of the innovation process and also follows from [40]. Using (18), the achieved distortion directly evaluates as , demonstrating the optimality of the encoding architecture depicted in Fig. 4. …”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…By the orthogonality principle, the distortion achieved by this method can be decomposed as (18) Moreover where (a) follows from the successive conditioning property of conditional expectation and the fact that is a function of , (b) from the fact that in the jointly Gaussian case and from the linearity of conditional expectation and (c) from the successive conditioning property of conditional expectation and our jointly Gaussian assumption. The second term in the distortion (18) can thus be written as It corresponds to the distortion of the innovation process and also follows from [40]. Using (18), the achieved distortion directly evaluates as , demonstrating the optimality of the encoding architecture depicted in Fig.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Rate-Constrained Collaborative Noise Reduction for Wireless Hearing Aids

Roy

Vetterli

2009

IEEE Trans. Signal Process.

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Abstract-Hearing aids are electronic, battery-operated sensing devices which aim at compensating various kinds of hearing impairments. Recent advances in low-power electronics coupled with progresses made in digital signal processing offer the potential for substantial improvements over state-of-the-art systems. Nevertheless, efficient noise reduction in complex listening scenarios remains a challenging task, partly due to the limited number of microphones that can be integrated on such devices. We investigate the noise reduction capability of hearing instruments that may exchange data by means of a rate-constrained wireless link and thus benefit from the signals recorded at both ears of the user. We provide the necessary theoretical results to analyze this collaboration mechanism under two different coding strategies. The first approach takes full benefit of the binaural correlation, while the second neglects it, since binaural statistics are difficult to estimate in a practical setting. The gain achieved by collaborating hearing aids as a function of the communication bit rate is then characterized, both in a monaural and a binaural configuration. The corresponding optimal rate allocation strategies are computed in closed form. While the analytical derivation is limited to a simple acoustic scenario, the latter is shown to capture many of the features of the general problem. In particular, it is observed that the loss incurred by coding schemes which do not consider the binaural correlation is rather negligible in a very noisy environment. Finally, numerical results obtained using real measurements corroborate the potential of our approach in a realistic scenario.Index Terms-Beamforming, binaural noise reduction, collaborating hearing aids, remote source coding with side information, spatial filtering, wireless link.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Rate-Constrained Collaborative Noise Reduction for Wireless Hearing Aids

Roy

Vetterli

2009

IEEE Trans. Signal Process.

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“…The first category mostly consists of multichannel algorithms, therein combining spatial and spectral filtering, which attempt to reduce noise with an additional constraint on auditory scene preservation [3][4][5]. These algorithms are commonly designed by modifying the noise-reduction-related cost functions such that the binaural cues are kept undistorted [3,6,7].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…These algorithms are commonly designed by modifying the noise-reduction-related cost functions such that the binaural cues are kept undistorted [3,6,7]. It has been shown that the binaural multichannel Wiener filter (MWF) [8] and the binaural minimum-variance distortionlessresponse (MVDR) beamformer [9,10] can preserve the binaural cues of the speech components, whereas the binaural cues of the noise components will be distorted.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Binaural noise reduction via cue-preserving MMSE filter and adaptive-blocking-based noise PSD estimation

Azarpour

Enzner

2017

EURASIP J. Adv. Signal Process.

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Binaural noise reduction, with applications for instance in hearing aids, has been a very significant challenge. This task relates to the optimal utilization of the available microphone signals for the estimation of the ambient noise characteristics and for the optimal filtering algorithm to separate the desired speech from the noise. The additional requirements of low computational complexity and low latency further complicate the design. A particular challenge results from the desired reconstruction of binaural speech input with spatial cue preservation. The latter essentially diminishes the utility of multiple-input/single-output filter-and-sum techniques such as beamforming. In this paper, we propose a comprehensive and effective signal processing configuration with which most of the aforementioned criteria can be met suitably. This relates especially to the requirement of efficient online adaptive processing for noise estimation and optimal filtering while preserving the binaural cues. Regarding noise estimation, we consider three different architectures: interaural (ITF), cross-relation (CR), and principal-component (PCA) target blocking. An objective comparison with two other noise PSD estimation algorithms demonstrates the superiority of the blocking-based noise estimators, especially the CR-based and ITF-based blocking architectures. Moreover, we present a new noise reduction filter based on minimum mean-square error (MMSE), which belongs to the class of common gain filters, hence being rigorous in terms of spatial cue preservation but also efficient and competitive for the acoustic noise reduction task. A formal real-time subjective listening test procedure is also developed in this paper. The proposed listening test enables a real-time assessment of the proposed computationally efficient noise reduction algorithms in a realistic acoustic environment, e.g., considering time-varying room impulse responses and the Lombard effect. The listening test outcome reveals that the signals processed by the blocking-based algorithms are significantly preferred over the noisy signal in terms of instantaneous noise attenuation. Furthermore, the listening test data analysis confirms the conclusions drawn based on the objective evaluation.

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“…So different binaural noise reduction techniques have been proposed for enhancement of the target signal arriving from any arbitrary direction (i.e., sound localization). These binaural noisereduction strategies are based on spectral subtraction [31], statistical methods [32], and multichannel Wiener filtering (MWF) [33], [34]. The majority of the reported binaural noise-reduction techniques is fully exploiting this binaural unmasking effect to further improve speech intelligibility.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

An Improved Perceptual MBSS Noise Reduction with an SNR-Based VAD for a Fully Operational Digital Hearing Aid

Guo

Wang

et al. 2017

IEICE Trans. Inf. & Syst.

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SUMMARYThis paper first reviews the state-of-the-art noise reduction methods and points out their vulnerability in noise reduction performance and speech quality, especially under the low signal-noise ratios (SNR) environments. Then this paper presents an improved perceptual multiband spectral subtraction (MBSS) noise reduction algorithm (NRA) and a novel robust voice activity detection (VAD) based on the amended sub-band SNR. The proposed SNR-based VAD can considerably increase the accuracy of discrimination between noise and speech frame. The simulation results show that the proposed NRA has better segmental SNR (segSNR) and perceptual evaluation of speech quality (PESQ) performance than other noise reduction algorithms especially under low SNR environments. In addition, a fully operational digital hearing aid chip is designed and fabricated in the 0.13 μm CMOS process based on the proposed NRA. The final chip implementation shows that the whole chip dissipates 1.3 mA at the 1.2 V operation. The acoustic test result shows that the maximum output sound pressure level (OSPL) is 114.6 dB SPL, the equivalent input noise is 5.9 dB SPL, and the total harmonic distortion is 2.5%. So the proposed digital hearing aid chip is a promising candidate for high performance hearing-aid systems.

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Extension of the multi-channel Wiener filter with ITD cues for noise reduction in binaural hearing aids

Cited by 27 publications

References 10 publications

Rate-Constrained Collaborative Noise Reduction for Wireless Hearing Aids

Rate-Constrained Collaborative Noise Reduction for Wireless Hearing Aids

Binaural noise reduction via cue-preserving MMSE filter and adaptive-blocking-based noise PSD estimation

An Improved Perceptual MBSS Noise Reduction with an SNR-Based VAD for a Fully Operational Digital Hearing Aid

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