N-dimensional N-microphone sound source localization

Abstract

This paper investigates real-time N-dimensional wideband sound source localization in outdoor (far-field) and lowdegree reverberation cases, using a simple N-microphone arrangement. Outdoor sound source localization in different climates needs highly sensitive and high-performance microphones, which are very expensive. Reduction of the microphone count is our goal. Time delay estimation (TDE)-based methods are common for N-dimensional wideband sound source localization in outdoor cases using at least N + 1 microphones. These methods need numerical analysis to solve closed-form non-linear equations leading to large computational overheads and a good initial guess to avoid local minima. Combined TDE and intensity level difference or interaural level difference (ILD) methods can reduce microphone counts to two for indoor two-dimensional cases. However, ILD-based methods need only one dominant source for accurate localization. Also, using a linear array, two mirror points are produced simultaneously (half-plane localization). We apply this method to outdoor cases and propose a novel approach for N-dimensional entire-space outdoor far-field and low reverberation localization of a dominant wideband sound source using TDE, ILD, and headrelated transfer function (HRTF) simultaneously and only N microphones. Our proposed TDE-ILD-HRTF method tries to solve the mentioned problems using source counting, noise reduction using spectral subtraction, and HRTF. A special reflector is designed to avoid mirror points and source counting used to make sure that only one dominant source is active in the localization area. The simple microphone arrangement used leads to linearization of the non-linear closedform equations as well as no need for initial guess. Experimental results indicate that our implemented method features less than 0.2 degree error for angle of arrival and less than 10% error for three-dimensional location finding as well as less than 150-ms processing time for localization of a typical wideband sound source such as a flying object (helicopter). © 2013 Pourmohammad and Ahadi; licensee Springer.