Title
The Binaural LCMV Beamformer and its Performance Analysis
Abstract
The recently proposed binaural linearly constrained minimum variance (BLCMV) beamformer is an extension of the well-known binaural minimum variance distortionless response (MVDR) beamformer, imposing constraints for both the desired and the interfering sources. Besides its capabilities to reduce interference and noise, it also enables to preserve the binaural cues of both the desired and interfering sources, hence making it particularly suitable for binaural hearing aid applications. In this paper, a theoretical analysis of the BLCMV beamformer is presented. In order to gain insights into the performance of the BLCMV beamformer, several decompositions are introduced that reveal its capabilities in terms of interference and noise reduction, while controlling the binaural cues of the desired and the interfering sources. When setting the parameters of the BLCMV beamformer, various considerations need to be taken into account, e.g. based on the amount interference and noise reduction and the presence of estimation errors of the required relative transfer functions (RTFs). Analytical expressions for the performance of the BLCMV beamformer in terms of noise reduction, interference reduction, and cue preservation are derived. Comprehensive simulation experiments, using both measured acoustic transfer functions as well as real recordings on binaural hearing aids, demonstrate the capabilities of the BLCMV beamformer in various noise environments.
Year
DOI
Venue
2016
10.1109/TASLP.2016.2514496
IEEE/ACM Transactions on Audio, Speech and Language Processing (TASLP)
Keywords
Field
DocType
Binaural cues,Hearing aids,LCMV beamformer,Noise reduction,Relative transfer function
Noise reduction,Minimum-variance unbiased estimator,Noise measurement,Expression (mathematics),Computer science,Speech recognition,Transfer function,Interference (wave propagation),Sound localization,Binaural recording
Journal
Volume
Issue
ISSN
PP
99
2329-9290
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
21
0.81
23
Authors
3
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Elior Hadad11216.76
Simon Doclo278279.31
Sharon Gannot31754130.51