Evaluation of binaural noise reduction methods in terms of intelligibility and perceived localization

In this paper, we perceptually evaluate two recently proposed binaural multi-microphone speech enhancement methods in terms of intelligibility improvement and binaural-cue preservation. We compare these two methods with the well-known binaural minimum variance distortionless response (BMVDR) method. More specifically, we measure the 50% speech reception threshold, and the localization error of all dominant point sources in three different acoustic scenes. The listening tests are divided into a parameter selection phase and a testing phase. The parameter selection phase is used to select the algorithms' parameters based on one acoustic scene. In the testing phase, the two methods are evaluated in two other acoustic scenes in order to examine their robustness. Both methods achieve significantly better intelligiblity compared to the unprocessed scene, and slightly worse intelligibility than the BMVDR method. However, unlike the BMVDR method which severely distorts the binaural cues of all interferers, the new methods achieve localization errors which are not significantly different compared to those of the unprocessed scene.