Tue, 10 May, 15:00 - 15:45 UTC
You will experience the effects of broad-array binaural beamforming in real time using a hearing assistive device we have developed. The stereo input/output device consists of two pieces of earphones wired through a control box with three tactile switches. The binaural beamforming algorithm implemented in Qualcomm QCC5144, a general- purpose SoC, operates with low latency and provides a natural hearing experience for people with hearing loss as well as for people with normal hearing. Imagine you are in a restaurant enjoying a conversation with a friend or beloved one. You may have experienced difficulty in hearing in such a noisy environments. In such cases, using cues from both ears is very important for hearing. Therefore, we have developed a binaural signal processing function that preserves the information cues of both ears and incorporates them into the signal flow of a side-branch filter-bank. In addition, hearing devices such as hearing aids a severely constrained in terms of computational cost due to low latency and battery life issues. We have solved these limitations by implementing MVDR with a pre-designed fixed filter in the frequency domain. The MVDR retains the directional information of the desired sound source, but distorts the sense of direction of the interfering signal, making spatial separation from the desired source difficult. In fact, the MVDR-IC algorithm used in this system can be tuned with Interaural Coherence as a trade-off parameter, and is expected to improve the audibility by spatial separation of interfering signals. As a demonstration, the selection of the desired direction and the trade-off parameters can be handled via the smartphone application. To achieve low latency WDRC and MVDR-IC, frequency warped filter-bank and frequency domain filtering are employed. You can experience the effect with headphones by wearing our prototype hearing assistive device on the dummy head. We will also provide online participants with a video showing the effects of binaural beamforming that was taken in advance.