Binaural mask-informed speech enhancement for hearing aids with head tracking

Abstract

An end-to-end speech enhancement system for hearing aids is pro- posed which seeks to improve the intelligibility of binaural speech in noise during head movement. The system uses a reference beam- former whose look direction is informed by knowledge of the head orientation and the a priori known direction of the desired source. From this a time-frequency mask is estimated using a deep neural network. The binaural signals are obtained using bilateral beam- formers followed by a classical minimum mean square error speech enhancer, modified to use the estimated mask as a speech presence probability prior. In simulated experiments, the improvement in a binaural intelligibility metric (DBSTOI) given by the proposed sys- tem relative to beamforming alone corresponds to an SNR improve- ment of 4 to 6 dB. Results also demonstrate the individual contribu- tions of incorporating the mask and the head orientation-aware beam steering to the proposed system.