A machine-hearing system exploiting head movements for binaural sound localisation in reverberant conditions

N Ma, T May, H Wierstorf, G J Brown, "A machine-hearing system exploiting head movements for binaural sound localisation in reverberant conditions," in IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP), p. 2699-2703 (2015). [ link ]

Bibtex

@inproceedings{Ma2015,
    title     = {A machine-hearing system exploiting head movements for
                 binaural sound localisation in reverberant conditions},
    author    = {Ma, Ning and May, Tobias and Wierstorf, Hagen
                 and Brown, Guy J.},
    booktitle = {IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal
                 Processing (ICASSP)},
    address   = {Brisbane, Australia},
    pages     = {2699--2703},
    month     = {April},
    year      = {2015},
    doi       = {10.1109/ICASSP.2015.7178461},
    url       = {https://doi.org/10.1109/ICASSP.2015.7178461}
}

Abstract

This paper is concerned with machine localisation of multiple active speech sources in reverberant environments using two (binaural) microphones. Such conditions typically present a problem for `classical’ binaural models. Inspired by the human ability to utilise head movements, the current study investigated the influence of different head movement strategies on binaural sound localisation. A machine-hearing system that exploits a multi-step head rotation strategy for sound localisation was found to produce the best performance in simulated reverberant acoustic space. This paper also reports the public release of a free binaural room impulse responses (BRIRs) database that allows the simulation of head rotation used in this study.