Comparison of microphone array designs for hearing aid

We perform simulation of various digital signal processing microphone array architectures to compare their suitability for a hearing aid pre-processor. The architectures include fixed narrowband array, general sidelobe canceler array and maximum energy array. The arrays are all equi-spaced linear array. In particular, arrays with 6 microphones and various number of taps have been simulated under typical hearing aid environment of reverberance, short speaker distance and competing speakers. The sampling frequency is chosen to be 10 kHz, with the physical length of the array being 17 cm. The improvements of various array designs are demonstrated and discussed