IPDnet2: an efficient and improved inter-channel phase difference estimation network for sound source localization

IPDnet is our recently proposed real-time sound source localization network. It employs alternating full-band and narrow-band (B)LSTMs to learn the full-band correlation and narrow-band extraction of DP-IPD, respectively, which achieves superior performance. However, processing narrow-band independently incurs high computational complexity and the limited scalability of LSTM layers constrains the localization accuracy. In this work, we extend IPDnet to IPDnet2, improving both localization accuracy and efficiency. IPDnet2 adapts the oSpatialNet as the backbone to enhance spatial cues extraction and provide superior scalability. Additionally, a simple yet effective frequency-time pooling mechanism is proposed to compress frequency and time resolutions and thus reduce computational cost, and meanwhile not losing localization capability. Experimental results show that IPDnet2 achieves comparable localization performance with IPDnet while only requiring less than 2% of its computation cost. Moreover, the proposed network achieves state-of-the-art SSL performance by scaling up the model size while still maintaining relatively low complexity.