From the inferior colliculus to a computational sound localization model

In this paper, we describe a spiking neural network for building an azimuthal sound localisation system, which is inspired by the functional organisation of the human auditory midbrain up to the inferior colliculus (IC). Our system models two ascending pathways from the cochlear nucleus to the IC: an ITD (Inter- aural Time Difference) pathway and an ILD (Interaural Level Difference) pathway. We take into account Yin's finding [1] that multiple delay lines only exist in the contralateral medial superior olive (MSO) in our modelling of the ITD pathway. A level-locking auditory neuron is introduced for the ILD pathway network to encode sound amplitude into spike sequences. At the IC level, we differentiate between low frequency (below 1 kHz) and high frequency (above 1 kHz) sound in how we combine the ITD and ILD cues to compute the azimuth angle of a sound. This paper provides a detailed illustration of the biological evidence of our hybrid ITD and ILD model. Experimental results of several types of sound are presented to evaluate our system.

@Article{LEW08b, 
 	 author =  {Liu, Jindong and Erwin, Harry and Wermter, Stefan},  
 	 title = {From the inferior colliculus to a computational sound localization model}, 
 	 journal = {Neural Network World: International journal on non-standard computing and artificial intelligence},
 	 number = {},
 	 volume = {19 (5)},
 	 pages = {499--512},
 	 year = {2008},
 	 month = {},
 	 publisher = {},
 	 doi = {}, 
 }