Practical utility of a head-mounted gaze-directed beamforming system

Culling, John F. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1107-9802, D'Olne, Emilie F. C., Davies, Bryn D., Powell, Niamh and Naylor, Patrick A. 2023. Practical utility of a head-mounted gaze-directed beamforming system. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 154 (6) , pp. 3760-3768. 10.1121/10.0023961

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Abstract

Assistive auditory devices that enhance signal-to-noise ratio must follow the user's changing attention; errors could lead to the desired source being suppressed as noise. A method for measuring the practical benefit of attention-following speech enhancement is described and used to show a benefit for gaze-directed beamforming over natural binaural hearing. First, participants watched a recorded video conference call between two people with six additional interfering voices in different directions. The directions of the target voices corresponded to the spatial layout of their video streams. A simulated beamformer was yoked to the participant's gaze direction using an eye tracker. For the control condition, all eight voices were spatially distributed in a simulation of unaided binaural hearing. Participants completed questionnaires on the content of the conversation, scoring twice as high in the questionnaires for the beamforming condition. Sentence-by-sentence intelligibility was then measured using new participants who viewed the same audiovisual stimulus for each isolated sentence. Participants recognized twice as many words in the beamforming condition. The results demonstrate the potential practical benefit of gaze-directed beamforming for hearing aids and illustrate how detailed intelligibility data can be retrieved from an experiment that involves behavioral engagement in an ongoing listening task.

Item Type:	Article
Date Type:	Published Online
Status:	Published
Schools:	Psychology
Publisher:	Acoustical Society of America
ISSN:	0001-4966
Date of First Compliant Deposit:	19 December 2023
Date of Acceptance:	29 November 2023
Last Modified:	21 Dec 2023 11:45
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/164961

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