Room Volume Estimation Based on Ambiguity of Short-Term Interaural Phase Differences Using Humanoid Robot Head

Abstract

Abstract:Humans can recognize approximate room size using only binaural audition. However, sound reverberation is not negligible in most environments. The reverberation causes temporal fluctuations in the short-term interaural phase differences (IPDs) of sound pressure. This study proposes a novel method for a binaural humanoid robot head to estimate room volume. The method is based on the statistical properties of the short-term IPDs of sound pressure. The humanoid robot turns its head toward a sound source, recognizes the sound source, and then estimates the ego-centric distance by its stereovision. By interpolating the relations between room volume, average standard deviation, and ego-centric distance experimentally obtained for various rooms in a prepared database, the room volume was estimated by the binaural audition of the robot from the average standard deviation of the short-term IPDs at the estimated distance.

Omnidirectional Haptic Guidance for the Hearing Impaired to Track Sound Sources

“…The distance to a sound source was estimated by using the variation of the frequency response of the short-term interaural phase difference of sound pressure. This section describes a method for evaluating the variation of the frequency response of the short-time interaural phase difference of sound pressure [40]. Let us explain its method briefly.…”

Wearable Hearing Assist System to Provide Hearing-Dog Functionality

“…It is known that the reverberation causes temporal fluctuations in short-term interaural phase differences (IPDs) and interaural level differences (ILDs) [21,22]. The statistical properties of the received sound signals have been processed in the sound source localization in room acoustics [22][23][24][25][26][27]. The accuracy of measurement decreased in a shorter time frame.…”