Dynamic intensity beamforming system for noise reduction in a binaural hearing aid

In a binaural hearing aid, beamforming apparatus for reducing noise in the sound signal provided by the hearing aid to a user, said hearing aid processing left and right frequency domain vectors corresponding to left and right audio signals, said beamforming apparatus comprising:

• means responsive to the left and right frequency domain vectors for generating a direction estimate vector indicating a direction an audio signal is coming from relative to the line of sight of the hearing aid user;
• means responsive to the left and right frequency domain vectors for generating a beam intensity vector indicating strength of the sound arriving at the hearing aid wearer;
• means for scaling the direction estimate vector with the beam intensity vector to produce a beam gain vector, said beam gain vector is similar to the direction estimate vector for high beam intensity strength and approaches a uniform value irrespective of the direction estimate vector as the strength of the beam intensity vector decreases;
• and
• means for amplifying the right and left sound frequency domain vectors with the beam gain vector whereby for high beam intensity strength the left and right signals are beamformed and as the beam intensity strength decreases the beamforming of the left and right signals decreases until for low beam intensity strength there is no beamforming.

Audio signal processing apparatus for processing audio signals received by a plurality of audio sensors oriented in a predetermined viewing direction, said apparatus comprising:

• a beamformer responsive to the audio signals from the plurality of sensors for separating online signals arriving at the audio sensors in a direction near the viewing directions from off-line signals arriving from other directions;
• a monitor for monitoring signals and determining a signal strength for a plurality of the audio signals from the audio sensors;
• and
• beamformer enabler responsive to the signal strength for enabling said beamformer when the signal strength is high and for inhibiting said beamformer when the signal strength is low.