Localization of directional sound sources supported by a priori information of the acoustic environment

Abstract

Speaker localization with microphone arrays has received significant attention in the pastdecade as a means for automated speaker tracking of individuals in a closed space for videoconferencingsystems, directed speech capture systems, and surveillance systems. Traditional techniques are based onestimating the relative time difference of arrivals (TDOA) between different channels, by utilizing crosscorrelationfunction. As we show in the context of speaker localization, these estimates yield poor results,due to the joint effect of reverberation and the directivity of sound sources. In this paper, we present anovel method that utilizes a priori acoustic information of the monitored region, which makes it possibleto localize directional sound sources by taking the effect of reverberation into account. The proposedmethod shows significant improvement of performance compared with traditional methods in "noise-free" condition. Further work is required to extend its capabilities to noisy environments.