A Combined Method for Localizing Two Overlapping Acoustic Sources Based on Deep Learning

Deep learning approaches for multi-source sound localization face significant challenges, particularly the need for extensive training datasets encompassing diverse spatial configurations to achieve robust generalization. This requirement leads to substantial computational demands, which are further exacerbated when localizing overlapping sources in complex acoustic environments with reverberation and noise. In this paper, a new methodology is proposed for simultaneous localization of two overlapping sound sources in the time–frequency domain in a closed, reverberant environment with a spatial resolution of 10° using a small-sized microphone array. The proposed methodology is based on the integration of the sound source separation method with a single-source sound localization model. A hybrid model was proposed to separate the sound source signals received by each microphone in the array. The model was built using a bidirectional long short-term memory (BLSTM) network and trained on a dataset using the ideal binary mask (IBM) as the training target. The modeling results show that the proposed localization methodology is efficient in determining the directions for two overlapping sources simultaneously, with an average localization accuracy of 86.1% for the test dataset containing short-term signals of 500 ms duration with different signal-to-signal ratio values.