The fusion of distributed microphone arrays for sound localization

  • Authors:
  • Parham Aarabi

  • Affiliations:
  • Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario, Canada

  • Venue:
  • EURASIP Journal on Applied Signal Processing
  • Year:
  • 2003

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Abstract

This paper presents a general method for the integration of distributed microphone arrays for localization of a sound source. The recently proposed sound localization technique, known as SRP-PHAT, is shown to be a special case of the more general microphone array integration mechanism presented here. The proposed technique utilizes spatial likelihood functions (SLFs) produced by each microphone array and integrates them using a weighted addition of the individual SLFs. This integration strategy accounts for the different levels of access that a microphone array has to different spatial positions, resulting in an intelligent integration strategy that weighs the results of reliable microphone arrays more significantly. Experimental results using 10 2-element microphone arrays show a reduction in the sound localization error from 0.9m to 0.08m at a signal-to-noise ratio of 0 dB. The proposed technique also has the advantage of being applicable to multimodal sensor networks.