Binaural sound source localization in the presence of reverberation

Abstract

Binaural sound source localization consists in estimating the position of a sound source with respect to a single pair of stationary microphones. A possible implementation of binaural localization exploits the information contained in two physical cues: the Interaural Time Difference (ITD) and the Interaural Level Difference (ILD). A recent paper [1] described a novel approach to binaural source localization based on a joint ILD-ITD estimation. The present work describes the effect of acoustic reverberation on this method. As expected, reverberation adds uncertainty to the localization process, thusmaking it necessary to introduce proper prefiltering techniques.