Acoustic noise control: An overview of several methods based on applications in hearing aids

In order to reduce interfering signal components for hearing aids, a complete noise reduction system is described which consists of monaural and binaural beam-formers and a single channel noise reduction for further enhancement. Firstly, the monaural part combines the two or three microphones of each side of the head to adaptively suppress non desired sources outside the line of sight. Secondly, binaural approaches combine the output signals of both beamformers to further reduce the interfering components. Finally, the single channel noise reduction systems suppress longer-term stationary and transient signals, independent of their spatial characteristics.