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Abstract: Binaural hearing aids allow for a wireless exchange of microphone signals between a left and a right device. A significant noise reduction performance improvement can be achieved compared to a monaural configuration (a single device) or a bilateral configuration (in which the devices work independently). In addition, the binaural localization cues, i.e. the Interaural Time Differences and Interaural Level Differences, can also be better preserved in a binaural procedure. It was previously proven that a binaural noise reduction procedure based on the Speech Distortion Weighted Multi-channel Wiener Filter (SDW-MWF) indeed preserves the speech localization cues, if all microphone signals can be exchanged. However, in practice, it may not be feasible to exchange all microphone signals between the devices, so that reduced-bandwidth SDW-MWF schemes (where only filtered combinations of microphone signals are exchanged) have to be utilized. This paper demonstrates that a straightforward reduced-bandwidth SDW-MWF scheme still preserves the speech ITD cues, but distorts the speech ILD cues, in a single speech source scenario. Novel reduced-bandwidth SDW-MWF schemes, which make use of a common spectral postfilter, are therefore introduced. Experiments in a reverberant environment demonstrate that the novel schemes reduce the ILD distortion, without severely degrading the noise reduction performance. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: Per-tone pulse shaping has been proposed as an alternative to time domain spectral shaping for DMT transmitters. It shapes the spectrum of individual tones such that their stop band energy contribution can be minimized. In per-tone pulse shaping based DMT transmitters a fixed order non-sparse pulse shaping filter is typically used for every tone. Furthermore, no specific power loading scheme is used. However, the contribution of a particular tone to the stop band energy depends on the amount of power transmitted on the tone and the distance of the tone from the band edges. Tones with sufficiently low power as well as tones sufficiently away from the band edges could be assigned a sparse pulse shaping filter, which could then help to reduce the overall number of filter taps. In general the combination of power loading and sparse pulse shaping filters can be used to achieve a high data rate under given resource constraints. In this paper we present an algorithm to optimally allocate the available resources, i.e., power and filter taps, under PSD mask constraints, which is based on a dual problem formulation. This algorithm achieves a high performance with relatively low complexity, which is also demonstrated by simulations. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: In current DSL systems, crosstalk is a major source of performance degradation. For upstream VDSL scenarios with in-domain crosstalk and AWGN, it has been shown that the crosstalk can be effectively mitigated using a linear zero-forcing canceler. Furthermore, the complexity can be reduced by only canceling the crosstalk from major crosstalkers, which is referred to as partial crosstalk cancellation. However, such approach does not work well in scenarios that also have out-of-domain (alien) crosstalk. As alien crosstalk is spatially correlated, the zero-forcing canceler performs very poorly, hence alternative structures for the canceler have to be examined. In this paper, we first demonstrate that an MMSE-based linear and nonlinear crosstalk canceler provides improved performance compared to the zero-forcing canceler in this scenario and then present efficient algorithms to perform partial crosstalk cancellation with these MMSE-based cancelers. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: Multi-input multi-output (MIMO) systems are often realized with low cost front-end architectures, e.g. the so-called direct conversion (or zero IF) architectures. However, such systems are very sensitive to imperfections in the analog front-end resulting in radio frequency (RF) impairments such as in-phase/quadrature-phase (IQ) imbalance and carrier frequency offset (CFO). These RF impairments can result in a severe performance degradation. In this paper we propose RF impairment compensation techniques for orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) based MIMO systems. We consider a digital compensation scheme for joint transmitter/receiver frequency selective IQ imbalance, CFO and channel distortion. We also show that in the case where there is no transmitter IQ imbalance, the receiver IQ imbalance compensation can be de-coupled from the channel equalization resulting in a compensation in two stages. The two-stage scheme results in an overall lower computational requirement. The various compensation schemes are demonstrated to provide a performance close to the ideal case without RF impairments. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]