Rectified binaural ratio: A complex T-distributed feature for robust sound localization

Abstract

Most existing methods in binaural sound source localization rely on some kind of aggregation of phase- and level-difference cues in the time-frequency plane. While different aggregation schemes exist, they are often heuristic and suffer in adverse noise conditions. In this paper, we introduce the rectified binaural ratio as a new feature for sound source localization. We show that for Gaussian-process point source signals corrupted by stationary Gaussian noise, this ratio follows a complex t-distribution with explicit parameters. This new formulation provides a principled and statistically sound way to aggregate binaural features in the presence of noise. We subsequently derive two simple and efficient methods for robust relative transfer function and time-delay estimation. Experiments on heavily corrupted simulated and speech signals demonstrate the robustness of the proposed scheme.