Sound source localization with binaural hearing aids using adaptive blind channel identification

Abstract

This paper applies blind channel identification (BCI) to estimate direction of arrival (DOA) of sound sources with a pair of binaural hearing aids. It compares the Adaptive Eigenvalue Decomposition Algorithm (AEDA) with the Adaptive Principal Component Algorithm (APCA) for blindly estimating the impulse responses from target to hearing aids and these impulse responses are used to estimate DOA. This paper investigates how both the time difference and the level difference of the impulse responses can be used to estimate DOA, and the performance of both algorithms is evaluated for scenarios with different reverberation times, different SNR, and different source positions. The paper also evaluates the tracking behavior in a dual-talker scenario. The results show that AEDA's DOA performance suffers in the presence of noise and reverberation. APCA is fairly insensitive to noise, but it can only handle moderate levels of reverberation.