Localization based on enhanced low frequency interaural level difference

The processing of low-frequency interaural time differences is found to be problematic among hearing-impaired people. The current generation of beamformers does not consider this deficiency. In an attempt to tackle this issue, we propose to replace the inaudible interaural time differences in the low-frequency region with the interaural level...

Clock-Offset and Microphone Gain Mismatch Invariant Beamforming

The use of wireless acoustic sensor networks (WASNs) has received increased attention over the last decade. The advantages of WASNs over stand-alone multi-microphone devices are that the microphone array is not anymore limited by the dimensions of a single device, and that microphones can be placed at arbitrary locations. One of the...

Inferring the location of reflecting surfaces exploiting loudspeaker directivity

Accurate sound field reproduction in rooms is often limited by the lack of knowledge of the room characteristics. Information about the room shape or nearby reflecting boundaries can, in principle, be used to improve the accuracy of the reproduction. In this paper, we propose a method to infer the location of nearby reflecting boundaries from...

Sensor selection and rate distribution based beamforming in wireless acoustic sensor networks

Power usage is an important aspect of wireless acoustic sensor networks (WASNs) and reducing the amount of information that is to be transmitted is one effective way to save it. In previous contributions, we presented sensor selection as well as rate distribution methods to reduce the power usage of beamforming algorithms in WASNs. Taking...

A Convex Approximation of the Relaxed Binaural Beamfomring Optimization Problem

The recently proposed relaxed binaural beamforming (RBB) optimization problem provides a flexible tradeoff between noise suppression and binaural-cue preservation of the sound sources in the acoustic scene. It minimizes the output noise power, under the constraints, which guarantee that the target remains unchanged after processing and the...

Distributed Rate-Constrained LCMV Beamforming

In this letter, we propose a decentralized framework for rate-distributed linearly constrained minimum variance (LCMV) beamforming in wireless acoustic sensor networks. To save the energy usage within the network, we propose to minimize the transmission cost and put a constraint on the noise reduction performance. Subsequently, we...

Rate-Distributed Spatial Filtering Based Noise Reduction in Wireless Acoustic Sensor Networks

In wireless acoustic sensor networks (WASNs), sensors typically have a limited energy budget as they are often battery driven. Energy efficiency is therefore essential to the design of algorithms in WASNs. One way to reduce energy costs is to only select the sensors which are most informative, a problem known as sensor selection. In this way,...

A Low-Cost Robust Distributed Linearly Constrained Beamformer for Wireless Acoustic Sensor Networks with Arbitrary Topology

We propose a new robust distributed linearly constrained beamformer which utilizes a set of linear equality constraints to reduce the cross power spectral density matrix to a block-diagonal form. The proposed beamformer has a convenient objective function for use in arbitrary distributed network topologies while having identical performance...

Relaxed Binaural LCMV Beamforming

In this paper, we propose a new binaural beamforming technique, which can be seen as a relaxation of the linearly constrained minimum variance (LCMV) framework. The proposed method can achieve simultaneous noise reduction and exact binaural cue preservation of the target source, similar to the binaural minimum variance distortionless response ...

A distributed algorithm for robust LCMV beamforming

In this paper we propose a distributed reformulation of the linearly constrained minimum variance (LCMV) beamformer for use in acoustic wireless sensor networks. The proposed distributed minimum variance (DMV) algorithm, for which we demonstrate implementations for both cyclic and acyclic networks, allows the optimal beamformer output to be...

On the Impact of Quantization on Binaural MVDR Beamforming

Multi-microphone noise reduction algorithms in binaural hearing aids which cooperate through a wireless link have the potential to become of great importance in future hearing aid systems. However, limited transmission capacity of such devices necessitates the data compression of signals transmitted from one hearing aid to the contralateral one....