Binaural dereverberation based on a dual-channel Wiener filter with optimized noise field coherence

In this paper a novel speech enhancement algorithm for binaural dereverberation is proposed. It is based on a multichannel Wiener filter approach, which is optimized for the application to digital hear-ing aids and binaural telephony headsets. This is mainly done by two different modifications. First, an optimized model for the bin-aural coherence which takes the shadowing effects of the head into account. Second, a binaural input-output structure which does not affect the most important binaural cues, i.e., interaural time differ-ence (ITD) and interaural level difference (ILD), and hence, keeps the localization ability. Evaluations with measured binaural room impulse responses (BRIR) show that this approach is capable of re-ducing reverberation especially in highly reverberant environments. Index Terms — Binaural, dereverberation, binaural cue preser-vation, coherence, speech enhancement 1