Abstract
I describe some engineering methods that have been used frequently for estimating directions of arrivals (DOAs) of sound sources first. I further present a new DOA estimation method based on the generalized cross correlation function (GCC) weighted by the inverse of the difference spectrum between the channels. I evaluate the performances of the above methods assuming that two omni directional microphones are placed in free space. Next, I investigate the availability of the proposed GCC as a binaural sound localization model. The results of the investigation demonstrate that the performances of the proposed method in two-dimensional DOA estimation from binaural sound are comparable to those of the high resolution method Multiple Signal Classification (MUSIC) method which is considered to be a central method in engineering field. Moreover, the validity as binaural localization model is demonstrated by the performance in case where the phase information is omitted to simulate the auditory characteristics at the high frequency band.
