  In a recent work on direction-of-arrival (DOA) estimation of multiple
speakers with convolutional neural networks (CNNs), the phase component of
short-time Fourier transform (STFT) coefficients of the microphone signal is
given as input and small filters are used to learn the phase relations between
neighboring microphones. Due to this chosen filter size, $M-1$ convolution
layers are required to achieve the best performance for a microphone array with
M microphones. For arrays with large number of microphones, this requirement
leads to a high computational cost making the method practically infeasible. In
this work, we propose to use systematic dilations of the convolution filters in
each of the convolution layers of the previously proposed CNN for expansion of
the receptive field of the filters to reduce the computational cost of the
method. Different strategies for expansion of the receptive field of the
filters for a specific microphone array are explored. With experimental
analysis of the different strategies, it is shown that an aggressive expansion
strategy results in a considerable reduction in computational cost while a
relatively gradual expansion of the receptive field exhibits the best DOA
estimation performance along with reduction in the computational cost.
