Binaural Beamforming Taking into Account Spatial Release from Masking

This collection of MATLAB code relates to work by De Vries et al. [J1]. A demo script is included as an example demonstration of how the included functions can be used. This demo script also generates the MATLAB figures that appear in the paper. Brief function descriptions are provided for all functions in the main and functions folders, which can also be called up through the help command.

In the paper denoted as J1, the performance of different binaural beamformers is evaluated and compared in an extended signal model that incorporates the spatial release of masking (SRM) effect. Additionally, a novel beamformer (bfPcv.m) is proposed that optimally increases the SRM compensated signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) while simultaneously preserving the binaural cues of interferers.

The functionsExt folder contains necessary external functions originating from ANSI/ASA [i], Beutelmann et al. [ii] and Andersen et al. [iii]. The data folder contains speech samples from the TIMIT Acoustic-Phonetic Continuous Speech Corpus [iv] and head related transfer functions (HRTFs) from the Oldenburg database of HRTFs [v].

[J1] J. W. de Vries, S. van de Par, G. Leus, R. Heusdens, and R. C. Hendriks, “Binaural beamforming taking into account spatial release from masking,” IEEE/ACM Trans. Audio Speech Lang. Process., to be published.

[i] Methods for Calculation of the Speech Intelligibility Index, ANSI/ASA Standard S3.5-1997.

[ii] R. Beutelmann, T. Brand, and B. Kollmeier, “Revision, extension, and evaluation of a binaural speech intelligibility model,” J. Acoust. Soc. Amer., vol. 127, no. 4, pp. 2479–2497, Apr. 2010.

[iii] A. H. Andersen, J. M. de Haan, Z.-H. Tan, and J. Jensen, “Refinement and validation of the binaural short time objective intelligibility measure for spatially diverse conditions,” Speech Commun., vol. 102, pp. 1–13, Sep. 2018.

[iv] J. S. Garofolo et al., 1993, “TIMIT acoustic-phonetic continuous speech corpus,” Linguistic Data Consortium, doi: https://doi.org/10.35111/17gk-bn40.

[v] F. Denk, S. M. A. Ernst, S. D. Ewert, and B. Kollmeier, “Adapting hearing devices to the individual ear acoustics: Database and target response correction functions for various device styles,” Trends Hearing, vol. 22, pp. 1–19, 2018.

Related publications

1. Binaural Beamforming Taking into Account Spatial Release from Masking
   Johannes W. de Vries; Steven van de Par; Geert Leus; Richard Heusdens; Richard C. Hendriks;
   Trans. Audio, Speech and Language Processing, 2024.,
   2024.