Circular Statistics-based low complexity DOA estimation for hearing aid application
This work addresses DoA estimation for hearing aid users, offering a low-complexity solution that is incremental in improving existing methods.
The paper tackled the problem of direction-of-arrival (DoA) estimation for binaural hearing aids by proposing the CIMPL method, which uses circular statistics of inter-microphone phase differences and a wrapped Kalman filter, resulting in improved accuracy and a 75x speedup compared to a benchmark.
The proposed Circular statistics-based Inter-Microphone Phase difference estimation Localizer (CIMPL) method is tailored toward binaural hearing aid systems with microphone arrays in each unit. The method utilizes the circular statistics (circular mean and circular variance) of inter-microphone phase difference (IPD) across different microphone pairs. These IPDs are firstly mapped to time delays through a variance-weighted linear fit, then mapped to azimuth direction-of-arrival (DoA) and lastly information of different microphone pairs is combined. The variance is carried through the different transformations and acts as a reliability index of the estimated angle. Both the resulting angle and variance are fed into a wrapped Kalman filter, which provides a smoothed estimate of the DoA. The proposed method improves the accuracy of the tracked angle of a single moving source compared with the benchmark method provided by the LOCATA challenge, and it runs approximately 75 times faster.