THE HOUGH TRANSFORM FOR BINAURAL SOURCE LOCALIZATION

We introduce a new technique for the blind localization of several sound sources from two binaural signals. First, the binaural signals are organized as two-dimensional data where each sound source appears as a line. Second, the Hough transform is used to recognize these lines. The slopes of the lines give the mixing coefficients and directions of arrival (azimuths). Two variants of our technique are proposed, based on only one of the interaural level or time differences, respectively. Although a rapid comparison to a well-known localization method as well as promising results are shown, they are clearly not exhaustive and this paper should rather be regarded as a feasibility demonstration of the new technique.

[1]  Richard O. Duda,et al.  Use of the Hough transformation to detect lines and curves in pictures , 1972, CACM.

[2]  Bill Gardner,et al.  HRTF Measurements of a KEMAR Dummy-Head Microphone , 1994 .

[3]  C. Avendano,et al.  The CIPIC HRTF database , 2001, Proceedings of the 2001 IEEE Workshop on the Applications of Signal Processing to Audio and Acoustics (Cat. No.01TH8575).

[4]  Boris Mansencal,et al.  RetroSpat: a Perception-Based System for Semi-Automatic Diffusion of Acousmatic Music , 2008 .

[5]  Scott Rickard,et al.  Blind separation of speech mixtures via time-frequency masking , 2004, IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing.

[6]  Özgür Yilmaz,et al.  Blind separation of disjoint orthogonal signals: demixing N sources from 2 mixtures , 2000, 2000 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing. Proceedings (Cat. No.00CH37100).

[7]  Barbara G Shinn-Cunningham,et al.  Localizing nearby sound sources in a classroom: binaural room impulse responses. , 2005, The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America.

[8]  Harald Viste,et al.  Binaural localization and separation techniques , 2004 .

[9]  Harald Viste,et al.  Binaural Source Localization , 2004 .

[10]  Daniel P. W. Ellis,et al.  EM Localization and Separation using Interaural Level and Phase Cues , 2007, 2007 IEEE Workshop on Applications of Signal Processing to Audio and Acoustics.

[11]  Sylvain Marchand,et al.  A Source Localization/Separation/Respatialization System Based on Unsupervised Classification of Interaural Cues , 2006 .