A Two-dimensional Position Estimate of Two Sound Sources Using Two Microphones with Reflectors

Abstract

Human beings and living things have the capability of identifying the directions of two or more sounds by a certain amount of correctness with only two ears. However it is difficult to give this capability to robots. Almost all the robots which have been proposed until now have three or more microphones in order to localize sound sources. In this paper, we propose a technique of estimating two kinds of directions, that is, vertical and horizontal directions, using a robot head consisted of two microphones, where the microphones of the robot head have reflectors working like the pinna.