Spatial Localization of Multiple Sound Sources in a reverberant Environment

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a spatial localization of multiple sound sources using a spherical robot head ranged with four microphones. We obtain the arrival time difference using inter-aural time difference and inter-aural phase difference. Based on the model of precedence effect, arrival temporal disparities obtained from the zero-crossing point is used to calculate the time differences and suppress the influence of echoes in the reverberant environment. To integrate spatial cues of different microphone pairs, a mapping method from the correlation between different microphone pairs to a three dimension map corresponding to azimuth and elevation of sound sources direction is proposed. Experiments show the system provides the distribution of sound sources in azimuth-elevation, even concurrently in reverberant environments.