Binaural Localization Based on Weighted Wiener Gain Improved by Incremental Source Attenuation

This paper addresses the problem of direction-of-arrival (DOA) estimation both in azimuthal and elevation angle from binaural sound that is processed with a head-related transfer function (HRTF). Previously, we proposed a weighted Wiener gain (WWG) method for two-dimensional DOA estimation with two-directional microphones. However, for signals processed with HRTFs, peaks in the spatial spectra of WWG indicating true sources can mingle with spurious peaks. To resolve this situation, we propose to apply incremental source attenuation (ISA) in combination with WWG. In fact, ISA reduces spectral components originating from specified sound sources and thereby improves the localization accuracy of the next targeted source in the proposed incremental estimation procedure. We conduct computer simulations using directional microphones and four HRTF sets corresponding to four individuals. The proposed method is compared to two DOA estimation methods that are equivalent to two generalized cross-correlation functions and two high-resolution methods of multiple signal classification (MUSIC) and minimum variance method. For comparison purposes, we introduce binary coherence detection (BCD) to high-resolution methods for emphasizing valid spectral components for localization in multiple source conditions. Evaluation results demonstrate that, although MUSIC with BCD yield comparable performance to that of WWG in conditions where single speech source exists, WWG with ISA surpasses the other methods in conditions including two or three speech sources.