Low Delay Wind Noise Cancellation for Binaural Hearing Aids

Wind noise annoys hearing aid user, it is hard to attach the windscreen to hearing aid microphone for a reason of cosmetically issue.Accordingly, some hearing aid devices reduce low frequency components of input signal by using high-pass filter to suppress the wind noise.It is, however, not to satisfy for hearing aid users by using this way, because low frequency components have binaural auditory cues, which is important to detect lateral directionality.We previously proposed FFT-based binaural wind noise cancellation algorithm to preserve the cues.This algorithm required 32ms frame length to keep high frequency resolution in analysis and synthesis in order to detect wind noise finely.On the other hand, it is known that a tolerable delay time for mild hearing loss or better should be below about 5ms in high frequency region.In this study, we propose low delay binaural wind noise cancellation algorithm using frequency warped filter. Delay time caused by this algorithm is shorter than the tolerable one. As results of subjective experiments, the proposed method gives almost the same score as the conventional our FFT-based method for directionality of the output signal.