Objective perceptual quality assessment for self-steering binaural hearing aid microphone arrays

In this study a self-steering beamformer with binaural output for a head-worn microphone array is investigated in simulated and real- world conditions. The influence of the underlying sound propagation model on the estimation accuracy of the direction of arrival (DOA) estimation algorithm and the overall performance of the combined DOA-beamformer-system is evaluated. For this, technical performance measures as well as objective quality measures based on perceptual models of the auditory system are used. The self-steering beamformer showed better performance than a beamformer with fixed look-direction for SNR values above -2 dB if the propagation model includes at least a coarse head model.