  We present a novel learning-based approach to estimate the
direction-of-arrival (DOA) of a sound source using a convolutional recurrent
neural network (CRNN) trained via regression on synthetic data and Cartesian
labels. We also describe an improved method to generate synthetic data to train
the neural network using state-of-the-art sound propagation algorithms that
model specular as well as diffuse reflections of sound. We compare our model
against three other CRNNs trained using different formulations of the same
problem: classification on categorical labels, and regression on spherical
coordinate labels. In practice, our model achieves up to 43% decrease in
angular error over prior methods. The use of diffuse reflection results in 34%
and 41% reduction in angular prediction errors on LOCATA and SOFA datasets,
respectively, over prior methods based on image-source methods. Our method
results in an additional 3% error reduction over prior schemes that use
classification based networks, and we use 36% fewer network parameters.
