A speech distortion weighting based approach to integrated active noise control and noise reduction in hearing aids

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• Introduce speech distortion weighted integrated ANC and NR.
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• Theoretical derivation of the output SNR in the single speech source case.
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• Theoretical validation of the previous results: weighted ANC and NR (EUSIPCO '09).
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• Experimental comparison of un-weighted ANC and NR and weighted approaches.

This paper presents weighted approaches for integrated active noise control and noise reduction in hearing aids. The unweighted integrated active noise control and noise reduction scheme introduced in the previous work does not allow to trade-off between the active noise control and the noise reduction. In some circumstances it will, however, be useful to emphasize one of the functional blocks.Changing the original optimisation problem to a constrained optimisation problem leads to a scheme based on a weighted mean squared error criterion that allows to focus either on the active noise control or on the noise reduction. It is similarly possible to derive a scheme that allows to focus either on reducing the speech distortion or on reducing the residual noise at the eardrum. In a single speech source scenario and when the number of sound sources (speech plus noise sources) is less than or equal to the number of microphones, it is possible to derive a simple formula for the output signal-to-noise ratio of the latter scheme. It can then be shown that this scheme delivers a constant signal-to-noise ratio at the eardrum for any weighting factor.