title: A Binaural Steering Beamformer System for Enhancing a Moving Speech Source.
abstract: In many daily life communication situations, several sound sources are simultaneously active. While normal-hearing listeners can easily distinguish the target sound source from interfering sound sources-as long as target and interferers are spatially or spectrally separated-and concentrate on the target, hearing-impaired listeners and cochlear implant users have difficulties in making such a distinction. In this article, we propose a binaural approach composed of a spatial filter controlled by a direction-of-arrival estimator to track and enhance a moving target sound. This approach was implemented on a real-time signal processing platform enabling experiments with test subjects in situ. To evaluate the proposed method, a data set of sound signals with a single moving sound source in an anechoic diffuse noise environment was generated using virtual acoustics. The proposed steering method was compared with a fixed (nonsteering) method that enhances sound from the frontal direction in an objective evaluation and subjective experiments using this database. In both cases, the obtained results indicated a significant improvement in speech intelligibility and quality compared with the unprocessed signal. Furthermore, the proposed method outperformed the nonsteering method.
authors.affiliation: HörTech gGmbH, Oldenburg, Germany Cluster of Excellence "Hearing4all," Oldenburg, Germany k.adiloglu@hoertech.de.
authors.forename: Kamil
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Adiloğlu
authors.affiliation: Cluster of Excellence "Hearing4all," Oldenburg, Germany Medizinische Physik, Universität Oldenburg, Germany.
authors.forename: Hendrik
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Kayser
authors.affiliation: Cluster of Excellence "Hearing4all," Oldenburg, Germany Medizinische Physik, Universität Oldenburg, Germany.
authors.forename: Regina M
authors.initials: RM
authors.lastname: Baumgärtel
authors.affiliation: Cluster of Excellence "Hearing4all," Oldenburg, Germany Medizinische Physik, Universität Oldenburg, Germany Jade Hochschule, Oldenburg, Germany.
authors.forename: Sanja
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Rennebeck
authors.affiliation: Cluster of Excellence "Hearing4all," Oldenburg, Germany Medizinische Physik, Universität Oldenburg, Germany.
authors.forename: Mathias
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Dietz
authors.affiliation: HörTech gGmbH, Oldenburg, Germany Cluster of Excellence "Hearing4all," Oldenburg, Germany Medizinische Physik, Universität Oldenburg, Germany.
authors.forename: Volker
authors.initials: V
authors.lastname: Hohmann
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D003054:Cochlear Implants; D016208:Databases, Factual; D005260:Female; D006310:Hearing Aids; D034381:Hearing Loss / Q000503:physiopathology / Q000628:therapy*; D006801:Humans; D008144:Loudness Perception / Q000502:physiology; D008297:Male; D008875:Middle Aged; D009622:Noise / Q000009:adverse effects*; D011474:Prosthesis Design; D012680:Sensitivity and Specificity; D012815:Signal Processing, Computer-Assisted; D013017:Sound Localization / Q000502:physiology*; D013065:Speech Intelligibility; D013067:Speech Perception / Q000502:physiology
keywords: audio signal localization; objective evaluation; perceptual evaluation; signal enhancement; speech intelligibility