Sound Source Localization Based on Zero-Crossing Peak-Amplitude Coding

This paper presents a new method of sound source localization based on zero-crossings generated from binaural filter-bank outputs. To detect the sound source direction, in the conventional methods the inter-aural time differences (ITDs) and the inter-aural intensity differences (IIDs) are estimated using the cross-correlations of neuronal firing rates. However, these methods require high computational complexity involved in the computation of cross-correlations and they suffer from inaccuracies in estimating the ITDs and IIDs, especially in a noisy multisource environment. In this context, we propose a method using zero-crossing and peak-amplitudes (ZCPAs) of binaural filter-bank outputs for accurate and efficient estimation of ITDs and IIDs. The proposed method is able to provide accurate estimation of the sound source direction and robustness to noise while offering significantly less computational complexity compared to cross-correlation based methods.