HRTF-based two-dimensional robust least-squares frequency-invariant beamformer design for robot audition

TL;DR

This paper introduces a two-dimensional HRTF-based robust beamformer for robot audition, enabling explicit control over the entire 3D sound field, and demonstrates its effectiveness over previous fixed-elevation designs.

Contribution

It presents a novel 2D HRTF-based beamformer design for 3D sound field control in robot audition, improving upon prior 1D fixed-elevation methods.

Findings

Effective control of 3D sound field demonstrated

Outperforms previous fixed-elevation beamformer

Validated with signal-dependent and independent measures

Abstract

In this work, we propose a two-dimensional Head-Related Transfer Function (HRTF)-based robust beamformer design for robot audition, which allows for explicit control of the beamformer response for the entire three-dimensional sound field surrounding a humanoid robot. We evaluate the proposed method by means of both signal-independent and signal-dependent measures in a robot audition scenario. Our results confirm the effectiveness of the proposed two-dimensional HRTF-based beamformer design, compared to our previously published one-dimensional HRTF-based beamformer design, which was carried out for a fixed elevation angle only.