Improving adaptive feedback cancellation in hearing aids using an affine combination of filters

In adaptive feedback cancellation an adaptive filter is used to model the acoustic feedback path between the hearing aid loudspeaker and the microphone. An important parameter for adaptive filters is the step-size, providing a trade-off between fast convergence and low steady-state misalignment. In order to achieve both fast convergence as well as low steady-state misalignment, it has been proposed to use an affine combination scheme of two filters operating with different step-sizes. In this paper we apply such an affine combination scheme to the acoustic feedback cancellation problem in hearing aids. We show that for speech signals a time-domain affine combination scheme yields a biased solution. To reduce this bias we propose to use a partitioned-block frequency-domain affine combination scheme. Experimental results using measured acoustic feedback paths show that in terms of misalignment and added stable gain the proposed adaptive feedback cancellation system outperforms a system that only uses a single adaptive filter with either of the fixed step-sizes used for the affine combination scheme.