Application of particle filtering to an interaural time difference based head tracker for crosstalk cancellation

Crosstalk cancellation systems (CCSs) suffer from a rather narrow sweet spot and small head rotations introduce significant interaural time difference (ITD) errors at the ears of the listener that destroy the 3D experience. In a previous study, we proposed a CCS with a microphone-based head tracker that uses two microphones placed closed to the ears of the listener. The head orientation was estimated by minimizing the difference between the ITD of desired binaural signals and the ITD of the microphones signals. We present here an extension of the previously proposed system in which the tracking of the ITD error is performed using a particle filtering (PF) approach that allows to take into account the dynamics of the human head. The head dynamics are modelled as a Ornstein-Uhlenbeck process, which shows to be a closer approximation of the natural movements of the head. Experimental results shows that with the proposed PF approach, head rotations can be accurately tracked in the presence of noise and when multiple virtual sound sources are reproduced simultaneously.