Direction of arrival estimation (DoAE) aims at tracking a sound in azimuth and elevation. Recent advancements include data-driven models with inputs derived from ambisonics intensity vectors or correlations between channels in a microphone array. A spherical intensity map (SIM), or acoustic image, is an alternative input representation that remains underexplored. SIMs benefit from high-resolution microphone arrays, yet most DoAE datasets use low-resolution ones. Therefore, we first propose a super-resolution method to upsample low-resolution microphones. Next, we benchmark DoAE models that use SIMs as input. We arrive to a model that uses SIMs for DoAE estimation and outperforms a baseline and a state-of-the-art model. Our study highlights the relevance of acoustic imaging for DoAE tasks.

翻译：到达方向估计（DoAE）旨在跟踪声源在方位角和仰角上的位置。最新进展包括使用从高保真度强度矢量或麦克风阵列通道间相关性导出的输入的数据驱动模型。球面强度图（SIM），或称声学图像，是一种尚未充分探索的替代输入表示形式。SIM依赖于高分辨率麦克风阵列，但大多数DoAE数据集使用的是低分辨率阵列。为此，我们首先提出一种超分辨率方法，用于提升低分辨率麦克风的分辨率。接着，我们以SIM作为输入，对多种DoAE模型进行基准测试。最终提出了一种利用SIM进行DoAE估计的模型，其性能优于基线模型和当前最先进的模型。本研究凸显了声学成像在DoAE任务中的相关性。