Abstract :
An efficient beamforming scheme for wireless binaural hearing aids is proposed that provides a trade-off between the transmission bit rate and the amount of noise reduction. It is proposed to transmit only the low-frequency part of the signal from one hearing aid to the other, which is used in a binaural beamformer to generate the low-frequency part of the output. The high-frequency part is generated by a monaural beamformer using only the locally available microphone signals. The trade-off can be attained by adjusting the cutoff frequency of the lowpass filter. For speech sources with a 8 kHz bandwidth in the presence of an interfering source, it is shown that good performance can be achieved with a cutoff frequency of 4 kHz.
Keywords :
audio signal processing; hearing aids; low-pass filters; microphones; speech; bandwidth 8 kHz; cutoff frequency; frequency 4 kHz; interfering source; low-bandwidth binaural beamforming; lowpass filter; microphone signals; monaural beamformer; noise reduction; transmission bit rate; wireless binaural hearing aids;
