Abstract—In outdoor cases, TDOA-based methods with lower accuracy than DOA based methods but fewer microphones and less computation time, are used for 2D wideband sound source localization using only three microphones. Using these methods, outdoor (far-field) high accuracy sound source localization in different climates needs highly sensitive and high performance microphones which are very expensive. In the last decade, some papers were published to reduce the microphones count in indoor 2D sound source localization using TDE and ILD based methods simultaneously. However, these papers do not mention that using ILD-based methods need only one dominant source to be active for accurate localization. Also it is known that using a linear array, two mirror points will be produced simultaneously. This issue means we can localize 2D sound source only in half-plane. In this paper we propose a novel method to have 2D whole-Plane dominant sound source localization using TDE, ILD and HRTF-based methods simultaneously. Based on the proposed method, a special reflector (instead of dummy head) for microphones arrangement is designed and source counting method is used to find that only one dominant sound source is active in the localization area. Simulation results indicate that this method is useful in outdoor and low degree reverberation cases when we try to raise SNR using spectral subtraction and source counting methods.
Index Terms—Sound source localization, TDOA, TDE, PHAT, ITD, ILD, HRTF.
The authors are with the Electrical Engineering Department, Amirkabir University of Technology, Hafez Ave., Tehran 15914, Iran (e-mail: pourmohammad@aut.ac.ir; sma@aut.ac.ir)
Cite: Ali Pourmohammad and Seyed Mohammad Ahadi, "TDE-ILD-HRTF-Based 2D Whole-Plane Sound Source Localization Using Only Two Microphones and Source Counting," International Journal of Information and Electronics Engineering vol. 2, no. 3, pp. 307-313, 2012.