  Speaker localization for binaural microphone arrays has been widely studied
for applications such as speech communication, video conferencing, and robot
audition. Many methods developed for this task, including the direct path
dominance (DPD) test, share common stages in their processing, which include
transformation using the short-time Fourier transform (STFT), and a direction
of arrival (DOA) search that is based on the head related transfer function
(HRTF) set. In this paper, alternatives to these processing stages, motivated
by human hearing, are proposed. These include incorporating an auditory filter
bank to replace the STFT, and a new DOA search based on transformed HRTF as
steering vectors. A simulation study and an experimental study are conducted to
validate the proposed alternatives, and both are applied to two binaural DOA
estimation methods; the results show that the proposed method compares
favorably with current methods.
