pith. sign in

BiEAR: A Human Auditory-Inspired Adaptive Binaural Front-end for Multi-Speaker Localisation and Distance Estimation

1 Pith paper cite this work. Polarity classification is still indexing.

1 Pith paper citing it
abstract

We present BiEAR, a human auditory-inspired adaptive binaural front-end for multi-speaker localisation and distance estimation. Inspired by medial olivocochlear (MOC) feedback in human hearing, BiEAR uses a neural controller to adaptively adjust the frequency selectivity of a binaural auditory filterbank during inference. This yields time-frequency adaptive representations for ears, enabling the model to respond to changing acoustic conditions. We evaluate BiEAR on multi-speaker localisation and distance estimation in anechoic and real-room environments. Results show that the adaptive front-end improves localisation accuracy and robustness to unseen speakers and rooms compared with commonly used fixed binaural front-ends. Visualisation and analysis of learned filter adaptations show that BiEAR emphasises informative frequency bands over time. These findings suggest that adaptive, biologically inspired binaural front-ends can improve machine hearing robustness in complex acoustic scenes.

fields

eess.AS 1

years

2026 1

verdicts

UNVERDICTED 1

clear filters

representative citing papers

citing papers explorer

Showing 1 of 1 citing paper after filters.