Deep Learning-Enabled High-Resolution and Fast Sound Source Localization in Spherical Microphone Array System

While sound source localization (SSL) using a spherical microphone array system can be applied to obtain visual beam patterns of source distribution maps in a range of omnidirectional acoustic applications, the present challenges of the spherical measurement system on the valid frequency ranges and the spatial distortion as well as the grid-related limitations of data-driven SSL approaches raise the need to develop an appropriate method. Imbued by these challenges, this study proposes a deep learning (DL) approach to achieve the high-resolution performance of localizing multiple sound sources tailored for omnidirectional acoustic applications. First, we present a spherical target map representation that can panoramically pinpoint the position and strength information of multiple sound sources without any grid-related constraints. Then, a dual-branched spherical convolutional autoencoder is proposed to obtain high-resolution localization results from the conventional spherical beamforming maps while incorporating frequency-variant and distortion-invariant strategies to address the inherent challenges. We quantitatively and qualitatively assess our proposed method’s localization capability for multiple sound sources and validate that the proposed method can achieve far more precise and computationally efficient results than the existing approaches. By extension, we newly present the experimental setup that can create omnidirectional acoustic scenarios for the multiple SSL. By evaluating our proposed method in this experimental setup, we demonstrate the effectiveness and applicability of the proposed method with the experimental data. Our study delivers the proposed approach’s potential of being utilized in various SSL applications.