No abstract

Beamforming techniques for hearing aid applications are often evaluated using behind-the-ear (BTE) devices. However, the growing number of wearable devices with microphones has made it possible to consider new geometries for microphone array beamforming. In this paper, we examine the effect of array location and geometry on the performance of binaural minimum power distortionless response (BMPDR) beamformers. In addition to the classical adaptive BMPDR, we evaluate the benefit of a recently-proposed method that estimates the sample covariance matrix using a compact model. Simulation results show that using a chest-mounted array reduces noise by an additional 1.3 dB compared to BTE hearing aids. The compact model method is found to yield higher predicted intelligibility than adaptive BMPDR beamforming, regardless of the array geometry.

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Recent work in speech enhancement has proposed a polynomial eigenvalue decomposition (PEVD) method, yielding significant intelligibility and noise-reduction improvements without introducing distortions in the enhanced signal [1]. The method relies on the estimation of a space-time covariance matrix, performed in batch mode such that a sufficiently long portion of the noisy signal is used to derive an accurate estimate. However, in applications where the scene is nonstationary, this approach is unable to adapt to changes in the acoustic scenario. This paper thus proposes a frame-based procedure for the estimation of space-time covariance matrices and investigates its impact on subsequent PEVD speech enhancement. The method is found to yield spatial filters and speech enhancement improvements comparable to the batch method in [1], showing potential for real-time processing.