Sound localization based on a barn owl’s auditory system

The purpose of this paper was to develop a two-dimension sound localization system which can be used to localize a sound source in two dimensions, the elevation and azimuth directions. A technique used for the proposed system was based on auditory systems of barn owls. The ear systems of barn owls have special structures in which the levels of both ears are not lined up in the same level in order to distinguish elevations of sound source locations. The proposed system was tested to detect sound sources that were placed in the range of 3 meters away from the proposed system with nine different positions, Upper Left, Upper Center, Upper Right, Middle Left, Middle Center, Middle Right, Lower Left, Lower Center and Lower Right, in front of the proposed system. A function generator was used as a sound source in order to produce a sound of 4 kHz with sound’s intensity not less than 90dB measured at 1 meter away. The results showed that the proposed system was able to locate the sound sources successfully.