ABSE-NET: A Lightweight Neural Model for Active Binaural Speech Enhancement in Open-Fit Hearing Aids
Authors: De Hu, Xue Du, Qingying Zhao, Qintuya Si
Organizations: College of Computer Science, Inner Mongolia University, China · College of Electronic and Information Engineering, Inner Mongolia University, China
Open-fit hearing aids have attracted growing attention due to their superior wearing comfort. However, the open-fit design inevitably causes acoustic leakage into the ear canal, degrading the performance of existing binaural speech enhancement (BSE). To this end, we propose ABSE-NET, an active BSE framework integrating active noise control (ANC) with BSE to jointly enhance target speech and suppress acoustic leakage. The ABSE-NET pipeline cascades a binaural MVDR (BMVDR) with a lightweight neural network (LNN). The former achieves a coarse BSE, whereas the latter simultaneously cancels acoustic leakage and compensates for BMVDR-induced distortion. The LNN uses an encoder-decoder with a feature fusion module, which includes frequency-time dependency learning and convolutional attention blocks. Unlike traditional BSE+ANC solutions via adaptive filtering, ABSE-NET needs no in-ear microphone in practical deployment. Experiments validate its superiority over state-of-the-art methods. Code repository: https://github.com/Bream101/ABSE-NET.
Real-time binaural speech enhancement is constrained by latency, computational cost, and inter-device communication, yet existing efficient solutions predominantly address single-channel settings. In this paper, we introduce RT-Tango, a real-time distributed binaural speech enhancement framework designed for streaming on resource-constrained platforms and specifically for hearing aids. RT-Tango relies on a two-stage distributed architecture combining perceptually motivated ERB feature compression, lightweight grouped recurrent mask estimation, and temporal sparsification to reduce computational cost. Stringent latency constraints are addressed by decoupling spectral resolution from algorithmic delay using an asymmetric STFT, together with causal recurrent inference and online estimation of spatial statistics. Experimental results show that RT-Tango achieves competitive speech enhancement while significantly reducing MACs operations and functioning at ultra-low latencies as low as 8 ms.
Speech enhancement models typically apply uniform capacity across all frequencies, disregarding the non-uniform spectral resolution of human hearing. We propose BASENet, a frequency-adapted architecture that partitions the spectrum into Bark-scale bands and assigns each a scaled-capacity encoder derived from critical-band density, automatically granting deeper branches to perceptually dense low frequencies and lighter ones to high frequencies. A cross-band attention module captures harmonic dependencies across bands through compact frequency-pooled representations at linear complexity. Built on inverted residual blocks with dense connectivity and a convolutional recurrent network, BASENet achieves 3.55 PESQ and STOI96% on VoiceBank+DEMAND with only 0.83M parameters and 7.3 GMACs, the fewest parameters among all methods with PESQ > 3.50. A causal variant (3.44 PESQ) surpasses several non-causal baselines, confirming suitability for real-time streaming on resource-constrained devices.
Active noise cancellation (ANC) is widely deployed on consumer headphones and earbuds to suppress environmental noise. However, existing ANC systems require an error microphone at the user's ear canal to measure residual sound, preventing deployment on emerging open-ear wearable devices such as smart glasses and VR headsets, which leave the ear unoccluded. Here we present an ANC system for open-ear wearables that suppresses environmental noise using only microphones and miniaturized open-ear speakers embedded within the frame of the wearables, removing the need for an in-ear error microphone. Our low-latency computational pipeline uses a neural network to estimate the noise at the ear from an array of eight microphones distributed around the wearable's frame and generates an anti-noise signal in real-time. This mapping generalizes to unseen users and acoustic environments without prior acoustic measurement. We develop a custom glasses prototype and evaluate across eleven unseen users and eight unseen environments under mobility in the 100 to 1000 Hz frequency range, where environmental noise is concentrated. We achieve a mean noise reduction of 9.6 dB without any calibration, and 11.2 dB with a brief user-specific calibration. Further, we demonstrate that our approach extends to the broader class of open-ear wearables including VR headsets and headbands.