Rate-constrained noise reduction in wireless acoustic sensor networks

Wireless acoustic sensor networks (WASNs) can be used for centralized multi-microphone noise reduction, where the processing is done in a fusion center (FC). To perform the noise reduction, the data needs to be transmitted to the FC. Considering the limited battery life of the devices in a WASN, the total data rate at which the FC can...

Spatially Correct Rate-Constrained Noise Reduction For Binaural Hearing Aids in Wireless Acoustic Sensor Networks

Compared to monaural hearing aids (HAs), binaural hearing aid systems, in which there is a communication link between the two devices, have improved noise reduction capabilities and the ability to preserve binaural spatial information. However, the limited HA battery lifetime puts constraints on the amount of information that can be shared...

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...

Robust Joint Estimation of Multimicrophone Signal Model Parameters

One of the biggest challenges in multimicrophone applications is the estimation of the parameters of the signal model, such as the power spectral densities (PSDs) of the sources, the early (relative) acoustic transfer functions of the sources with respect to the microphones, the PSD of late reverberation, and the PSDs of microphone-self noise...

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 ...

TDOA-based Self-Calibration of Dual-Microphone Arrays

We consider the problem of determining the relative position of dual-microphone sub-arrays. The proposed solution is mainly developed for binaural hearing aid systems (HASs), where each hearing aid (HA) in the HAS has two microphones at a known distance from each other. However, the proposed algorithm can effortlessly be applied to acoustic...

DOA Estimation of Audio Sources in Reverberant Environments

Reverberation is well-known to have a detrimental impact on many localization methods for audio sources. We address this problem by imposing a model for the early reflections as well as a model for the audio source itself. Using these models, we propose two iterative localization methods that estimate the direction-of-arrival (DOA) of both the...

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....