%0 Journal Article
%T SVD-Based Optimal Filtering Technique for Noise Reduction in Hearing Aids Using Two Microphones
%A Jan Wouters
%A Marc Moonen
%A Jean-Baptiste Maj
%J EURASIP Journal on Advances in Signal Processing
%D 2002
%I Springer
%R 10.1155/s1687617202000690
%X We introduce a new SVD-based (Singular value decomposition) strategy for noise reduction in hearing aids. This technique is evaluated for noise reduction in a behind-the-ear (BTE) hearing aid where two omnidirectional microphones are mounted in an endfire configuration. The behaviour of the SVD-based technique is compared to a two-stage adaptive beamformer for hearing aids developed by Vanden Berghe and Wouters (1998). The evaluation and comparison is done with a performance metric based on the speech intelligibility index (SII). The speech and noise signals are recorded in reverberant conditions with a signal-to-noise ratio of 0 ¡é ? ¡ëdB and the spectrum of the noise signals is similar to the spectrum of the speech signal. The SVD-based technique works without initialization nor assumptions about a look direction, unlike the two-stage adaptive beamformer. Still, for different noise scenarios, the SVD-based technique performs as well as the two-stage adaptive beamformer, for a similar filter length and adaptation time for the filter coefficients. In a diffuse noise scenario, the SVD-based technique performs better than the two-stage adaptive beamformer and hence provides a more flexible and robust solution under speaker position variations and reverberant conditions.
%K VD-based technique
%K beamforming
%K noise reduction
%K hearing aids
%K speech intelligibility
%K diffuse noise.
%U http://dx.doi.org/10.1155/S1110865702000690