Go To Program 43 Binaural Cue Preservation in Binaural Hearing Aids with Reduced-Bandwidth Multichannel Wiener Filter Based Noise Reduction Bram Cornelis 1 Marc Moonen 1 Jan Wouters 2 1 Electrical engineering, ESAT/SCD - Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Heverlee - Leuven, Belgium 2 Neurosciences, Exp ORL - Katholieke Universiteit leuven, Leuven, Belgium The Speech Distortion Weighted Multichannel Wiener Filter (SDW-MWF) is a promising noise reduction algorithm, especially for binaural hearing aids where microphone signals can be exchanged between left and right hearing aid. It is also desirable to preserve the binaural cues of both the speech signal and the residual noise, in particular the interaural level differences (ILD's) and interaural time differences (ITD's), which are used to localize sound. It was previously shown that the SDW-MWF, when all microphone signals are exchanged, allows for a significant noise reduction as well as the preservation of the speech binaural cues. The MWF cost function can be extended so that the residual noise binaural cues are also preserved. As in practice not all microphone signals can be exchanged, reduced-bandwidth MWF algorithms will be used. In this paper a framework is proposed that allows the study of the binaural cue preservation of these reduced-bandwidth MWF algorithms. It is shown that the speech ITD cues are always preserved, but that the speech ILD cues may be distorted. A reduced-bandwidth binaural MWF reduces the speech ILD errors compared to a bilateral MWF, especially so when a good estimate of the speech signal is transmitted. View pdf