An online dereverberation algorithm for hearing aids with binaural cues preservation

A dereverberation method of a single speaker for binaural hearing aids is proposed. Thanks to binaural cues, listeners are capable of localizing sound sources even in reverberant enclosures. As the aim of dereverberation algorithms is the reduction of the sound reflections, it is changing the binaural cues of the reverberant signal. A recently proposed algorithm estimates both the early speech component and the room impulse response (RIR) in an online fashion. In this paper, we develop a binaural extension of this algorithm which enables a tradeoff between the amount of dereverberation and the preservation of the binaural cues of the reverberant signal. The method is tested using a database of binaural RIRs in different reverberation levels and source-listener distances. It is shown that the proposed method enables the tradeoff between improvement in the frequency-weighted signal to noise ratio (WSNR) scores and the preservation of the cues.