Blind Source Separation and Binaural Reproduction with Hearing Aids: An Overview

Abstract:
This paper addresses the problem of recovering or preserving spatial cues after microphone array processing by blind source separation. Based on the inherent identification of the unknown mixing system by blind source separation, we present several kinds of binaural reproduction algorithms. Firstly, we use the approximated mixing system for binaural reproduction by post-filtering. We are thus able to recover the spatial cues of the target source. Unfortunately, attenuated interfering sources are perceived from the direction of the target source. In order to achieve spatially correct binaural reproduction of interfering sources, we consider an adaptive post-processing algorithm.