Simulation of fixed microphone arrays for directional hearing aids.

Microphone arrays with fixed optimum weights are known to suppress the background noise and reverberation that severely reduce the effectiveness of conventional hearing aids. By means of a general technique for digital frequency-domain implementation of optimum broadband arrays that was developed recently [C. Liu and S. Sideman, J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 98, 241-247 (1995)], a practically promising system is proposed to realize the arrays with the well-known sensitivity-constrained superdirective beamforming weights, and with five identical omnidirectional, cardioid, hypercardioid, or dipole microphones, respectively, in the endfire or broadside configurations, which were theoretically proposed by Stadler and Rabinowitz [J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 94, 1332-1342 (1993)]. The digital broadband frequency-domain beamforming system allows the broadband superdirective beamforming weights to be faithfully and independently applied to each frequency component of the signal. The practical application of this technique is demonstrated through computer simulation of the system in anechoic situations. Furthermore, its performance in simulated reverberant environments is evaluated.