Microphone Array Optimization for a Hearing Restoration Headset
Philip Gillett, Marty E. Johnson, Efrain Araujo Perini, Alessandro Toso, Daniel M. Harris · Journal of the Audio Engineering Society · 2009
Subjects wearing communications or hearing protection headsets lose the ability to localize sound accurately. A hearing restoration headset designed to restore a user's natural hearing by processing signals from an array of microphones using a filter-and-sum technique and presenting the result to the user via the headset's speakers is described. Filters are designed using a phase compensation technique for mapping the microphone array manifolds (or directional transfer functions) onto the target HRTFs. To optimize the performance of the system, a three-dimensional numerical model of a KEMAR mannequin with headset was built and verified experimentally up to 12 kHz. The numerical model was used to optimize arrays with one, two, and three microphones, demonstrating low reconstruction error up to 12 kHz.