Method of Estimating Direction of Arrival of Sound Source for Monaural Hearing Based on Temporal Modulation Perception

Abstract

Although humans are capable of using monaural and modulation cues for sound localization, it is not yet clear how they can use that information to estimate the direction of arrival (DOA) of a sound source in 3D space. Our previous study revealed that the head-related modulation transfer function (HR-MTF) contains significant trends and features, which can be used for DOA estimation. This paper proposes a method of estimating the DOA in a 3D space by using the monaural modulation spectrum (MMS), based on the concept of modulation transfer function (MTF) and auditory perception of temporal modulation. We carried out over 51, 840 simulations with several signal types and multiple subjects to simultaneously estimate the azimuth and the elevation of an incoming sound source. The root mean square error (RMSE) was derived to evaluate the accuracy of monaural DOA estimates. Our results indicated that the proposed method could adequately estimate the DOA in 3D space with an overall mean RMSE of 21.9 degrees.