Multi-channel Wiener Filter for Speech Dereverberation in Hearing Aids - Sensitivity to DoA Errors

In this paper we study the robustness of a recently proposed Multi-channel Wiener Filter-based speech dereverberation algorithm to errors in the assumed direction of arrival (DoA) of the target speech. Different subsets of microphones of a pair of behind-the-ear hearing aids are used to construct various monaural and binaural configurations of the algorithm. Via a simulation experiment with frontally positioned target it is shown, that when correct DoA is assumed binaural configurations of the algorithm almost double the improvement of PESQ measure over monaural configurations. However, in conditions where the assumed DoA is increasingly incorrect, the performance of the binaural configurations is shown to deteriorate more quickly than that of the monaural configurations. In effect, for large DoA errors it is the simpler, monaural configurations that perform better.