Abstract
The benefit of using external acoustic sensor nodes for noise reduction in hearing aids is demonstrated in a simulated acoustic scenario with multiple sound sources. A distributed adaptive node-specific signal estimation (DANSE) algorithm, that has a reduced communication bandwidth and computational load, is evaluated. Batch-mode simulations compare the noise reduction performance of a centralized multi-channel Wiener filter (MWF) with DANSE. In the simulated scenario, DANSE is observed not to be able to achieve the same performance as its centralized MWF equivalent, although in theory both should generate the same set of filters. A modification to DANSE is proposed to increase its robustness, yielding smaller discrepancy between the performance of DANSE and the centralized MWF. Furthermore, the influence of several parameters such as the DFT size used for frequency domain processing and possible delays in the communication link between nodes is investigated.
Highlights
Noise reduction algorithms are crucial in hearing aids to improve speech understanding in background noise
The simulations in this paper show the potential of distributed adaptive node-specific signal estimation (DANSE) for noise reduction, as suggested in [13, 14], and provide a proof-of-concept for applying the algorithm in cooperative acoustic sensor networks for distributed noise reduction applications, such as hearing aids
The R-DANSE1 algorithm performs better than the DANSE1 algorithm, yielding an signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) increase of 1.5 to 2 dB, which is an increase of about 20% to 25%
Summary
Noise reduction algorithms are crucial in hearing aids to improve speech understanding in background noise. The term “node-specific” refers to the scenario in which each node acts as a data-sink and estimates a different desired signal This situation is interesting in the context of noise reduction in binaural hearing aids where the two hearing aids estimate differently filtered versions of the same desired speech source signal, which is important to preserve the auditory cues for directional hearing [15,16,17,18]. Batch-mode simulation results are described to demonstrate the benefit of using additional external sensor nodes for noise reduction in hearing aids. The simulations in this paper show the potential of DANSE for noise reduction, as suggested in [13, 14], and provide a proof-of-concept for applying the algorithm in cooperative acoustic sensor networks for distributed noise reduction applications, such as hearing aids.
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