Variable Speech Distortion Weightedmultichannel Wiener Filter Based on Soft Output Voice Activity Detection for Noise Reduction in Hearing Aids

This paper presents a variable Speech Distortion Weighted Multichannel Wiener Filter (SDW-MWF) based on soft output Voice Activity Detection (VAD) which is used for noise reduction in hearing aids. A traditional SDW-MWF uses a fixed parameter to trade-off between noise reduction and speech distortion. Consequently, the improvement in noise reduction comes at the cost of a higher speech distortion. With a variable SDW-MWF the goal is to improve the noise reduction without increasing the speech distortion. A soft output VAD is used to distinguish between speech, noise and to incorporate a variable trade-off. In speech dominant segments it is desirable to have less noise reduction to avoid speech distortion. In noise dominant segments it is desirable to have as much noise reduction as possible. Experimental results with a variable SDW-MWF show a SNR improvement with a lower speech distortion compared to a SDW-MWF.