The Effect of a Voice Activity Detector on the Speech Enhancement Performance of the Binaural Multichannel Wiener Filter

摘要

A multimicrophone speech enhancement algorithm for binaural hearing aids that preserves interaural time delays was proposed recently. The algorithm is based on multichannel Wiener filtering and relies on a voice activity detector (VAD) for estimation of second-order statistics. Here, the effect of a VAD on the speech enhancement of this algorithm was evaluated using an envelope-based VAD, and the performance was compared to that achieved using an ideal error-free VAD. The performance was considered for stationary directional noise and nonstationary diffuse noise interferers at input SNRs from ?10 to +5?dB. Intelligibility-weighted SNR improvements of about 20?dB and 6?dB were found for the directional and diffuse noise, respectively. No large degradations (