Neural Sound Field Decomposition with Super-resolution of Sound Direction

Abstract: Sound field decomposition predicts waveforms in arbitrary directions using signals from a limited number of microphones as inputs. Sound field decomposition is fundamental to downstream tasks, including source localization, source separation, and spatial audio reproduction. Conventional sound field decomposition methods such as Ambisonics have limited spatial decomposition resolution. This paper proposes a learning-based Neural Sound field Decomposition (NeSD) framework to allow sound field decomposition with fine spatial direction resolution, using recordings from microphone capsules of a few microphones at arbitrary positions. The inputs of a NeSD system include microphone signals, microphone positions, and queried directions. The outputs of a NeSD include the waveform and the presence probability of a queried position. We model the NeSD systems respectively with different neural networks, including fully connected, time delay, and recurrent neural networks. We show that the NeSD systems outperform conventional Ambisonics and DOANet methods in sound field decomposition and source localization on speech, music, and sound events datasets. Demos are available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0GIr6doj3BQ.