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

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.