Binaural sound source localization based on steered beamformer with spherical scatterer

Inspired by human sound localization, this paper introduces a novel approach to achieving binaural sound source localization in the frontal azimuthal half-plane based on steered beamformer. Instead of using HRTFs, a rigid sphere, whose transfer functions can be calculated accurately, is introduced to simulate the head effect. Sub-band beainformer using both the time cue ITD and the intensity cue IID is designed to process sound scattered by the rigid sphere. In the multi-band processing, a specialized filterbank is designed and the joint judgement strategy is employed. The whole system consists of the algorithm part, the hardware part and the user interface. Evaluation results by simulation and measurement experiments are also presented.EI