Beamforming for binaural hearing aids

Abstract

Binaural hearing aids making use of a wireless link are becoming a trend in hearing-aids design. However, it is still not clear how much gain can be obtained in complex real-life acoustic environments when using binaural hearing aids compared to monaural ones, and whether binaural hearing aids are worth the additional effort and complexity. This thesis aims to provide some answers to this question. In particular, it will compare the performance of different microphone array configurations, study the effects of using different head models for fixed beamforming design, assess the effect of head model mismatch and direction of arrival information mismatch, investigate methods to preserve the binaural cues, evaluate combinations of fixed binaural beamforming followed by other noise reduction algorithms, and assess the performance of the different algorithms using both classical beamforming metrics and objective measures related to speech quality and intelligibility.