A two‐stage binaural speech enhancement approach for hearing aids with preserving binaural benefits in noisy environments

Speech enhancement is one of the most crucial functions, if not the most, in hearing aids, as hearing impaired people have great difficulty in understanding speech in noisy environments. In this paper, we propose a two‐stage binaural speech enhancement approach for hearing aids, which consists of interference estimation by pre‐trained adaptive filters and speech enhancement using the Wiener filters. Main attention is then paid to the theoretical analysis of this system and the experimental comparisons with the traditional binaural speech enhancement approaches. The comparisons are conducted with the following two considerations: interference suppression performance and the ability in preserving binaural cues which give birth to listener's own “binaural gain.” We finally give the general discussion on this proposed binaural speech enhancement algorithm from the viewpoints of theory, through implementation, to evaluation.