Neural Steerer: Novel Steering Vector Synthesis with a Causal Neural Field over Frequency and Source Positions

Neural fields have successfully been used in many research fields for their native ability to estimate a continuous function from a finite number of observations. In audio processing, this technique has been applied to acoustic and head-related transfer function interpolation. However, most of the existing methods estimate the real-valued magnitude function over a predefined discrete set of frequencies. In this study, we propose a novel approach for steering vector interpolation that regards frequencies as continuous input variables. Moreover, we propose a novel unsupervised regularization term enforcing the estimated filters to be causal. The experiment using real steering vectors show that the proposed frequency resolution-free method outperformed the existing methods operating over discrete set of frequencies.