The Effect of a Voice Activity Detector on the Speech Enhancement

A multimicrophone speech enhancement algorithm for binaural hearing aids that preserves interaural time delays was proposed recently. The algorithm is based on multichannel Wiener filtering and relies on a voice activity detector (VAD) for estimation of second-order statistics. Here, the effect of a VAD on the speech enhancement of this algorithm was evaluated using an envelopebased VAD, and the performance was compared to that achieved using an ideal error-free VAD.

The performance was considered for stationary directional noise and nonstationary diffuse noise interferers at input SNRs from −10 to +5 dB. Intelligibilityweighted SNR improvements of about 20 dB and 6 dB were found for the directional and diffuse noise, respectively. No large degradations (