Comparison of frequency domain noise reduction strategies based on multichannel Wiener filtering and spatial prediction

In this paper two multichannel noise reduction strategies are compared in the context of binaural hearing aids. Recently a novel noise reduction method based on spatial-temporal prediction (STP) was introduced which showed an improvement over methods based on multichannel Wiener filtering, although at the cost of a higher computational complexity. Whereas this newmethod operates in the time domain, hearing aids typically demand faster frequency domain implementations. In this paper we therefore propose a frequency domain equivalent of the STP method. The performance of the new so-called spatial prediction (SP) method will be compared to a frequency domain implementation of the speech distortion weighted multichannel Wiener filter (SDW-MWF), theoretically as well as based on simulations with a binaural hearing aid configuration. It will be shown that the frequency domain SP method still achieves some improvement over the SDW-MWF, at the cost of higher computational complexity.