Influence of MVDR beamformer on a Speech Enhancement based Smartphone application for Hearing Aids

This paper presents the minimum variance distortionless response (MVDR) beamformer combined with a Speech Enhancement (SE) gain function as a real-time application running on smartphones that work as an assistive device to Hearing Aids. It has been shown that beamforming techniques improve the Signal to Noise Ratio (SNR) in noisy conditions. In the proposed algorithm, MVDR beamformer is used as an SNR booster for the SE method. The proposed SE gain is based on the Log-Spectral Amplitude estimator to improve the speech quality in the presence of different background noises. Objective evaluation and intelligibility measures support the theoretical analysis and show significant improvements of the proposed method in comparison with existing methods. Subjective test results show the effectiveness of the application in real-world noisy conditions at SNR levels of -5 dB, 0 dB, and 5 dB.