Acoustics Laboratory

Accurate estimation of the Direction of Arrival (DOA) of a sound source is an important prerequisite for a wide range of acoustic signal processing applications. However, in enclosed environments, early reflections and late reverberation often lead to localization errors. Recent work demonstrated that improved robustness against reverberation can be achieved by clustering only the DOAs from direct-path bins in the short-term Fourier transform of a speech signal of several seconds duration from a static talker. Nevertheless, for moving talkers, short blocks of at most several hundred milliseconds are required to capture the spatio-temporal variation of the source direction. Processing of short blocks of data in reverberant environment can lead to clusters whose centroids correspond to spurious DOAs away from the source direction. We therefore propose in this paper a novel multi-detection source tracking approach that estimates the smoothed trajectory of the source DOAs. Results for realistic room simulations validate the proposed approach and demonstrate significant improvements in estimation accuracy compared to single-detection tracking.