A method of howling detection in presence of speech signal

•This study proposes a frame-based howling detection method.•The method uses a VAD algorithm in the pre-processing step.•Applying VAD reduces computational complexity and false alarm probability.•Multiple features of the howling are checked to increase the accuracy.

Hearing aid users suffer from howling sound caused by acoustic coupling between the loudspeaker and the microphone(s) of this device. It is crucial to detect and eliminate the howling before it causes serious irritation to the hearing aid user. This study presents a multiple-feature method which uses voice activity detection (VAD) algorithm to reduce false alarm probability. Experimental results compare the performance of the proposed method with three conventional howling detection techniques in terms of detection probability, false alarm probability, and computational complexity. The proposed method possesses lower false alarm probability and less computational complexity compared to the other methods.