Practical MWF-based noise-reduction methods for binaural hearing aids

Abstract

Most hearing impaired people suffer from hearing loss in both ears, which is called a binaural hearing loss. To deal with these hearing losses, independent hearing aids have been typically used. However, psycho-acoustical studies using these prescriptions show that under hostile environments, e.g., babble noise at low SNR, people with a binaural hearing loss report an uncomfortable sound. In this sense, new generation hearing aids, called binaural hearing aids, have been proposed to include a wireless link to exchange information between both hearing devices. Although different noise-reduction methods have been proposed to be used in binaural hearing aids, they are impractical due to their hardware requirements such as computational complexity and wireless transmission bandwidth. In this paper, we propose binaural noise-reduction strategies based on multichannel Wiener filter (MWF) that reduces computational complexity and transmission bandwidth. The proposed strategy is compared to other existing MWF method, showing that our proposed method provides significant advantages.