An adaptive noise canceller for hearing aids using two nearby microphones

An adaptive noise cancellation scheme based on two-stage adaptive filtering as proposed by Van Compernolle Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (IEEE, New York, 1990) was tested for two identical directional microphones mounted in an endfire configuration within a single behind-the-ear (BTE) hearing aid. Speech intelligibility tests were carried out with two normal hearing subjects and three hearing aid users with moderate hearing losses, in a realistic test environment using open set words and sentences. A significant improvement, on average more than 5 dB, of speech reception threshold (SRT) in background noise was obtained.