Binaural Audio Source Remixing with Microphone Array Listening Devices
This work addresses audio enhancement for users of hearing aids and augmented reality devices, offering an incremental improvement over existing array-based methods.
The paper tackles the problem of enhancing audio perception in noisy environments by proposing a source-remixing filter that independently adjusts the levels of multiple sound sources, rather than isolating a single source, to reduce distortion and preserve spatial localization cues.
Augmented listening devices, such as hearing aids and augmented reality headsets, enhance human perception by changing the sounds that we hear. Microphone arrays can improve the performance of listening systems in noisy environments, but most array-based listening systems are designed to isolate a single sound source from a mixture. This work considers a source-remixing filter that alters the relative level of each source independently. Remixing rather than separating sounds can help to improve perceptual transparency: it causes less distortion to the signal spectrum and especially to the interaural cues that humans use to localize sounds in space.