抄録
Human hearing gives people several ways of better interaction with their environment, including sound recognition and sound localization. Without these cues a person lacks means to prevent many dangerous situations occurring in everyday life. In order to improve the quality of life of the hearing impaired, this research focuses on sound localization in the form of an easily-portable high-precision real-time device. The system is based on a set of 3 microphones, where each pair is just 20 mm apart. The localization system is purely based on the difference between the time-of-arrival of the sound at each pair of microphones. The system relies on severalfold upsampling of the input signal in order to retain high resolution, compensating for the effects of the small gap between the microphones. The aforementioned characteristics provide robustness and guarantee a wide frequency bandwidth. Simulations show that the theoretical model is correct and preliminary experimental results confirm the efficiency of the system. With a compact hardware implementation, the system has potential to be applied in mobile and wearable support devices for the hearing impaired.
