Abstract
The processing of low-frequency interaural time differences is found to be problematic among hearing-impaired people. The current generation of beamformers does not consider this deficiency. In an attempt to tackle this issue, we propose to replace the inaudible interaural time differences in the low-frequency region with the interaural level differences. In addition, a beamformer is introduced and analyzed, which enhances the low-frequency interaural level differences of the sound sources using a near-field transformation. The proposed beamforming problem is relaxed to a convex problem using semi-definite relaxation. The instrumental analysis suggests that the low-frequency interaural level differences are enhanced without hindering the provided intelligibility. A psychoacoustic localization test is done using a listening experiment, which suggests that the replacement of time differences into level differences improves the localization performance of normal-hearing listeners for an anechoic scene but not for a reverberant scene.
Highlights
Good hearing is a vital and important part of daily life
The information consists of the binaural cues and the binaural beamforming algorithms
The hearing-impaired people with cochlear hearing loss has been known to be utilizing the envelope time differences and the level differences in the high frequencies. This makes the proposed method, which preserves the phase and the levels in the high frequency while replacing the low-frequency ITD information with ILD a suitable method for those who suffer from cochlear hearing loss
Summary
Good hearing is a vital and important part of daily life. Being hearing impaired comes with many challenging situations ranging from private to social interactions. In some cases, hearing-impaired people can find themselves in dangerous situations due to the lack of hearing. Hearing-impaired people might feel isolated in practical situations due to the inability to differentiate and understand different sound sources in complex listening environments [1]. These people can benefit by using hearing aids. The information consists of the binaural cues and the binaural beamforming algorithms. Following the convention in [18] and [19], the time and level differences can be defined using the interaural transfer function (ITF). The input and output ITF for the target signal is defined as IT Fxin
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