An approach for sound source localization by complex-valued neural network

Abstract

This paper presents a Complex-Valued Neural Networkbased sound localization method. The proposed approach uses two microphones to localize sound sources in the whole horizontal plane. The method uses time delay and amplitude difference to generate a set of features which are then classified by a Complex-Valued Multi-Layer Perceptron. The advantage of using complex values is that the amplitude information can naturally masks the phase information. The proposed method is analyzed experimentally with regard to the spectral characteristics of the target sounds and its tolerance to noise. The obtained results emphasize and confirm the advantages of using Complex-Valued Neural Networks for the sound localization problem in comparison to the traditional Real-Valued Neural Network model. Copyright © 2013 The Institute of Electronics, Information and Communication Engineers.