Binaural pre-processing for contralateral sound field attenuation and improved speech-in-noise recognition

Abstract

Understanding speech presented in competition with other sounds can be challenging. Here, we reason that in free-field settings, this task can be facilitated by attenuating the sound field contralateral to each ear and propose to achieve this by linear subtraction of the weighted contralateral stimulus. We mathematically justify setting the weight equal to the ratio of ipsilateral to contralateral head-related transfer functions (HRTFs) averaged over an appropriate azimuth range. The algorithm is implemented in the frequency domain and evaluated technically and experimentally for normal-hearing listeners in simulated free-field conditions. Results show that (1) it can substantially improve the signal-to-noise ratio (up to 30 dB) and the short-term objective intelligibility in the ear ipsilateral to the target source, particularly for maskers with speech-like spectra; (2) it can improve speech reception thresholds (SRTs) for sentences in competition with speech-shaped noise by up to 8.5 dB in bilateral listening and 10.0 dB in unilateral listening; (3) for sentences in competition with speech maskers and in bilateral listening, it can improve SRTs by 2 to 5 dB, depending on the number and location of the masker sources; (4) it hardly affects virtual sound-source lateralization; and (5) the improvements, and the algorithm's directivity pattern depend on the azimuth range used to calculate the weights. Contralateral HRTF-weighted subtraction may prove valuable for users of binaural hearing devices.