A Novel Binaural Beamforming Scheme with Low Complexity Minimizing Binaural-cue Distortions

Abstract

While the majority of binaural beamformers aim to minimize the output noise power while (approximately) preserving the binaural cues of the sources using constraints, we propose in this paper to minimize the binaural-cue distortions of the sources in the acoustic scene, such that the output noise power is below a predefined threshold. This new problem formulation is a convex QCQP problem, which leads to an efficient trade-off between noise reduction, binaural-cue preservation and complexity. In particular, the proposed beamformer provides a better trade-off between noise reduction and binaural-cue preservation (in terms of interaural level and phase differences) compared to the well-known binaural minimum variance distortionless response-η beamformer.