Spatial noise reduction in binaural hearing aids

Binaural hearing aids are configured to have a wireless transmission link between the left and the right hearing aid. State-of-the-art hearing aids use two microphones in each instrument for compactness and power consumption constraints. In environments with multiple interferers, directional signal processing in hearing aids use techniques such as differential microphone arrays to improve speech intelligibility. However, these hearing aids have maximum sensitivity to target sources located directly in front or directly behind the user. In this paper, a novel binaural system is presented for steering the look direction of the hearing aid to other angles than 0/180 degrees. The new system was tested in a real-time environment to confirm the results.