Binaural Speech Processing with Application to Hearing Devices
Simon Doclo, Sharon Gannot, Daniel Marquardt, Elior Hadad · 2018
This chapter provides an overview of multi-microphone speech enhancement algorithms for a binaural hearing system, consisting of a hearing device on each ear of the user. In contrast to general multi-microphone speech enhancement algorithms, the objective of a binaural algorithm is not only to selectively enhance the desired speech source and to suppress interfering sources and ambient background noise, but also to preserve the auditory impression of the acoustic scene. This can be achieved by preserving the so-called binaural cues of the desired speech source, the interfering sources and the background noise, such that the binaural hearing advantage of the auditory system can be exploited and confusions due to a mismatch between acoustic and visual information are avoided. We describe a range of multichannel filters to achieve this goal.