Binaural auditory localization of signals processed by speech enhancement methods

Binaural hearing aids are allowing hearing impaired persons getting more information from surroundings (e.g., the direction of incident, stereo sound effect, etc.) than monaural, and the binaural noise reduction techniques become necessary for this type of assistive hearing devices. The aim of this paper is to assess the influences of speech enhancement procedures to the target source binaural auditory localization. Two binaural noise reduction approaches are investigated and used to enhance the corrupted speech for listening tests. Localization judgments of original and processed signals are conducted with six normal-hearing listeners. Results of listening experiments indicated that both of the two different noise reduction techniques have contribution to improving localization accuracy within different levels, but enhanced signals were still distorted as all the localization accuracy score are lower than clean signals.