Comparison of Binaural RTF-Vector-Based Direction of Arrival Estimation Methods Exploiting an External Microphone

Abstract

In this paper we consider a binaural hearing aid setup, where in addition to the head-mounted microphones an external microphone is available. For this setup, we investigate the performance of several relative transfer function (RTF) vector estimation methods to estimate the direction of arrival (DOA) of the target speaker in a noisy and reverberant acoustic environment. More in particular, we consider the state-of-the-art covariance whitening (CW) and covariance subtraction (CS) methods, either incorporating the external microphone or not, and the recently proposed spatial coherence (SC) method, requiring the external microphone. To estimate the DOA from the estimated RTF vector, we propose to minimize the frequency-averaged Hermitian angle between the estimated head-mounted RTF vector and a database of prototype head-mounted RTF vectors. Experimental results with stationary and moving speech sources in a reverberant environment with diffuse-like noise show that the SC method outperforms the CS method and yields a similar DOA estimation accuracy as the CW method at a lower computational complexity.

\c{opyright} 2021 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works

References in corpus (2)

• Robust Binaural Localization of a Target Sound Source by Combining Spectral Source Models and Deep Neural Networks
• FCN Approach for Dynamically Locating Multiple Speakers

Cited by in corpus (4)

• Assisted RTF-Vector-Based Binaural Direction of Arrival Estimation Exploiting a Calibrated External Microphone Array
• Coherence-Based Frequency Subset Selection For Binaural RTF-Vector-Based Direction of Arrival Estimation for Multiple Speakers
• Exploiting an External Microphone for Binaural RTF-Vector-Based Direction of Arrival Estimation for Multiple Speakers
• Completing Sets of Prototype Transfer Functions for Subspace-based Direction of Arrival Estimation of Multiple Speakers