Van den Bogaert Tim, Doclo Simon, Wouters Jan, Moonen Marc
ExpORL, K.U.Leuven, O & N 2-Herestraat 49 bus 721, B-3000 Leuven, Belgium.
J Acoust Soc Am. 2008 Jul;124(1):484-97. doi: 10.1121/1.2931962.
This paper evaluates the influence of three multimicrophone noise reduction algorithms on the ability to localize sound sources. Two recently developed noise reduction techniques for binaural hearing aids were evaluated, namely, the binaural multichannel Wiener filter (MWF) and the binaural multichannel Wiener filter with partial noise estimate (MWF-N), together with a dual-monaural adaptive directional microphone (ADM), which is a widely used noise reduction approach in commercial hearing aids. The influence of the different algorithms on perceived sound source localization and their noise reduction performance was evaluated. It is shown that noise reduction algorithms can have a large influence on localization and that (a) the ADM only preserves localization in the forward direction over azimuths where limited or no noise reduction is obtained; (b) the MWF preserves localization of the target speech component but may distort localization of the noise component. The latter is dependent on signal-to-noise ratio and masking effects; (c) the MWF-N enables correct localization of both the speech and the noise components; (d) the statistical Wiener filter approach introduces a better combination of sound source localization and noise reduction performance than the ADM approach.
本文评估了三种多麦克风降噪算法对声源定位能力的影响。对两种最近开发的用于双耳助听器的降噪技术进行了评估，即双耳多通道维纳滤波器（MWF）和带有部分噪声估计的双耳多通道维纳滤波器（MWF-N），以及双单声道自适应指向性麦克风（ADM），后者是商业助听器中广泛使用的一种降噪方法。评估了不同算法对感知声源定位的影响及其降噪性能。结果表明，降噪算法对定位可能有很大影响，并且（a）ADM仅在获得有限降噪或无降噪的方位上的前向方向上保留定位；（b）MWF保留目标语音成分的定位，但可能会扭曲噪声成分的定位。后者取决于信噪比和掩蔽效应；（c）MWF-N能够对语音和噪声成分进行正确定位；（d）统计维纳滤波器方法比ADM方法在声源定位和降噪性能方面实现了更好的结合。
