Perceptually-Inspired Processing for Multichannel Wiener Filter

Binaural noise-reduction techniques based on Multichannel Wiener filter (MWF) have been reported as promissory candidates to be used in binaural hearing aids because of their effective SNR improvement at any arbitrary direction of arrival of the target signal and the preservation of localization cues. There are different MWF techniques derived in the FFT domain. The use of an FFT-based processing involve two important challenges for the real-time implementation of these techniques in a digital hearing: high computational cost and processing delay. To reduce computational cost and processing delay without degrading the SNR improvement and sound quality, this paper proposes the use of an auditory representation instead of an FFT representation. The proposed processing shows significant advantages over an FFT-based processing: reduction of the computational cost and processing delay, and improvement of the output SNR and sound quality.