Multichannel Wiener filter method for noise reduction in reverberant environments for binaural hearing aids

Abstract

Binaural hearing aids have been recognized as the most optimal strategy to improve hearing in people with hearing impairment in both ears. In this sense, to improve hearing in noisy environments, binaural methods outperform monaural methods with respect to noise reduction, speech intelligibility and sound quality. Among binaural noise-reduction methods, multichannel Wiener filters (MWF) have shown to be the most promising techniques for binaural hearing aids. The latter due to its good performance in noisy environments and the feasibility to be implemented in ultra-low power embedded devices. However, existing MWF methods have been proposed and tested assuming non-reverberant environments. Since reverberation is a common effect in virtually all everyday environments, existing MWF methods have shown a significant performance degradation in these environments. Therefore, it is required to explore alternative MWF-based methods to efficiently reduce noise in reverberant environments. This paper presents a review of different reduction techniques based on MWF for reverberant noise environments and proposes a new MWF technique to improve existing methods.