Binaural Beamforming Using Pre-Determined Relative Acoustic Transfer Functions

Abstract

Binaural beamformers (BFs) aim to reduce the output noise power while simultaneously preserving the binaural cues of all sources. Typically, the latter is accomplished via
constraints relating the output and input interaural transfer functions (ITFs). The ITF is a function of the corresponding relative acoustic transfer function (RATF), which implies that RATF estimates of all sources in the acoustic scene are required. Here, we propose an alternative way to approximately preserve the binaural cues of the entire acoustic scene without estimating RATFs. We propose to preserve the binaural cues of all sources with a set of fixed pre-determined RATFs distributed around the head. Two recently proposed binaural BFs are evaluated in the context of using pre-determined RATFs and compared to the binaural minimum variance distrortionless response BF which can only preserve the binaural cues of the target.