Neural Field-of-View for Binaural Signal Matching with Wearable Microphone Arrays
The growing use of spatial audio in applications such as augmented and virtual reality has driven the development of binaural reproduction methods for wearable arrays with a limited number of microphones. Binaural signal matching (BSM) is one such method, producing high-quality binaural signals under a diffuse-field assumption, but degrading at high direct-to-reverberant ratios (DRR) where the direct sound dominates. Previous extensions incorporate Field-of-View (FoV) weighting, either with fixed apertures or based on explicit source localization, but these approaches are limited by coarse spatial coverage or reliance on localization estimation accuracy. This paper introduces FoV-BSM-Net, a signal-dependent FoV-BSM formulation that avoids explicit source estimation by learning the FoV parameters end-to-end from the microphone signals using a Convolutional Recurrent Neural Network. The method is evaluated in simulated rooms across varying reverberation conditions, and compared against BSM and a fixed FoV-BSM baseline. Results show that FoV-BSM-Net consistently improves over BSM, with gains that grow with DRR in both binaural NMSE and interaural cue errors, and are further supported by perceptual evaluation showing a substantial advantage over both baselines across low and high DRR conditions.