Performance comparison of binaural beamforming and MWF-based noise reduction algorithms for hearing aids

Noise reduction algorithms in hearing aids are crucial to improve speech understanding in background noise for hearing-impaired persons. For binaural hearing aids multi-microphone algorithms, exploiting signals from both the left and the right hearing aid, are considered to be promising techniques for noise reduction, because in addition to spectral information spatial sound information can be exploited. The performance of these algorithms however highly depends on prior assumptions about the acoustic environment and/or estimates of the signal statistics. In this paper the performance of 3 algorithms for a simulated everyday situation has been investigated using objective and subjective performance measures.