Localizing sound source by incorporating biological auditory mechanism

A novel system for multiple sound-source localization has been developed. It consists of three microphones, to resolve the anterior-posterior ambiguity inherent in the binaural time-difference cue. As in the biological auditory system, acoustic signals are decomposed into their frequency components via a set of bandpass filters and the intermicrophone phase differences are obtained around the onsets of the transiently changing signals. The phase differences at various frequencies are utilized to resolve the ambiguity in the correspondence relationship between the onsets derived from pairs of microphones. The scheme has been implemented as a personal-computer-based system and applied successfully to systems of two sound sources as well as a single sound source.<>