ILD preservation in the multichannel wiener filter for binaural hearing aid applications

This work presents a new method for noise reduction in binaural hearing aid applications that preserves the interaural level difference. A bounded symmetrical approximation of the logarithm is employed to estimate the interaural level difference, resulting in identical values for symmetrical (left/right) frontal angles. It proposes a new cost function to be used in association with the multichannel Wiener filter technique to provide a trade-off between noise reduction and distortion of the localization cues. Simulations of a binaural setup and comparisons with a previously developed technique show that the new method gives a signal to noise ratio improvement of up to 9.6 dB better than the baseline technique, for the same maximum-tolerated binaural-cue distortion.