Abstract
Acoustic coupling between microphone and loudspeaker is a significant problem in open-fit digital hearing aids. An open-fit compared to a close-fit hearing aid significantly lowers the signal quality and limits the achievable maximum stable gain. Adaptive feedback cancellation (AFC) enables an efficient approach to reduce the impact of acoustic coupling. However, without careful consideration, it can also introduce bias in estimating the feedback path due to the high correlation between the loudspeaker signal and the incoming signal, especially when the incoming signal is spectrally coloured, e.g., speech and music. The prediction error method (PEM) is well known for reducing this bias. The presented study aims to propose a switched PEM with soft-clipping (swPEMSC) that allows for further improvement in convergence/tracking rates, resulting in a better ability to recover from unstable/howling status. This swPEMSC employs a new update rule inspired by a soft-clipping based stability detector (SCSD). It allows to pick up either the PEMSC-NLMS or PEMSC-APA depending on the magnitude of the effective feedback signal; howling corresponds to a large feedback signal. The PEMSC-NLMS with a small step-size ensures a low steady-state error, but slow convergence/tracking rates, while PEMSC-APA with a large step-size allows for fast convergence/tracking rates, but a high steady-state error. By combining those approaches, the proposed approach can take advantage of good characteristics from both. Experimental results using different types of incoming signals and an abrupt change of feedback paths show that the swPEMSC can shorten unstable periods (howling) by improving the convergence and tracking rates while retaining a low steady-state error and good signal quality.
Highlights
Acoustic feedback occurs due to the acoustic coupling of the loudspeaker signal into the microphone(s)
In contrast to the authors of [44], we propose to employ soft-clipping based stability detector (SCSD) to control a switch between the prediction error method using soft clipping and NLMS (PEMSC-NLMS) and the PEMSC using affine projection algorithm (APA) (PEMSC-APA)
We propose a new and practical way to improve the adaptive feedback cancellation (AFC) performance in open-fit hearing aids
Summary
Acoustic feedback occurs due to the acoustic coupling of the loudspeaker signal into the microphone(s). It is a significant problem in public address (PA) systems and open-fit hearing aids (HAs). With the presence of the forward path, the feedback signal is amplified before looping back into the loudspeaker forming a closed-loop system. Adaptive feedback cancellation (AFC) has the prominence to reduce the adverse effect of acoustic feedback. This method estimates the acoustic feedback path by using an FIR filter, enabling an estimate of the feedback signal which can be cancelled from the microphone signal (cf Figure 1). Due to the closed-loop nature of the HA, the feedback path estimation can produce bias caused by the high correlation between loudspeaker signal and incoming signal [1,2,4]
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