Objective perceptual quality assessment for self-steering binaural hearing aid microphone arrays

In this study a self-steering beamformer with binaural output for a head-worn microphone array is investigated in simulated and realworld conditions. The influence of the underlying sound propagation model on the estimation accuracy of the direction of arrival (DOA) estimation algorithm and the overall performance of the combined DOA-beamformer-system is evaluated. For this, technical performance measures as well as objective quality measures based on perceptual models of the auditory system are used. The self-steering beamformer showed better performance than a beamformer with fixed look-direction for SNR values above -2 dB if the propagation model includes at least a coarse head model.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2008
• Where: ICASSP
• Authors: Thomas Rohdenburg, Stefan Goetze, Volker Hohmann, Karl-Dirk Kammeyer, Birger Kollmeier
• Keywords: ICASSP 2008, Propagation Model, Self-steering Beamformer, Signal Processing, Sound Propagation Model