We investigate the objective performance of five high-end commercially available Hearing Aid (HA) devices compared to DNN-based speech enhancement algorithms in complex acoustic environments. To this end, we measure the HRTFs of a single HA device to synthesize a binaural dataset for training two state-of-the-art causal and non-causal DNN enhancement models. We then generate an evaluation set of realistic speech-in-noise situations using an Ambisonics loudspeaker setup and record with a KU100 dummy head wearing each of the HA devices, both with and without the conventional HA algorithms, applying the DNN enhancers to the latter. We find that the DNN-based enhancement outperforms the HA algorithms in terms of noise suppression and objective intelligibility metrics.
@article{arxiv.2307.12888,
title = {An objective evaluation of Hearing Aids and DNN-based speech enhancement in complex acoustic scenes},
author = {Enric Gusó and Joanna Luberadzka and Martí Baig and Umut Sayin Saraç and Xavier Serra},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2307.12888},
year = {2023}
}