Sound-localization-preserved binaural MMSE STSA estimator with explicit and implicit binaural cues

In this paper, we address some variations of the source-localization-preserved MMSE STSA estimator used for binaural hearing aids. In our previous work, the sound-localization-preserved MMSE STSA estimator with ICA-based noise estimation has been proposed. However, this conventional method is based on an approximated optimization criterion and does not use binaural cues, resulting in poor noise reduction performance. To solve this problem, we propose two methods: a multichannel MMSE STSA estimator with explicit binaural cues, and a sound-localization-preserved generalized MMSE STSA estimator with different speech priors for the left and right channels as implicit bin-aural cues. From the results of objective and subjective evaluation, we confirm that the noise reduction performance is improved using the proposed method.