A Fast Microphone Array SRP-PHAT Source Location Implementation using Coarse-To-Fine Region Contraction(CFRC)

• Published in: 2007 IEEE Workshop on Applications of Signal Processing to Audio and Acoustics pp. 295 - 298
• Main Authors: Do, Hoang, Silverman, Harvey F.
• Format: Conference Proceeding
• Language: English
• Published: IEEE 01.10.2007
• Subjects: Acoustic noise; acoustic position measurement; arrays; Computational efficiency; Conferences; Costs; Grid computing; Microphone arrays; microphones; Optimization methods; Position measurement; Robustness; Stochastic processes; Working environment noise
• ISBN: 9781424416189; 1424416183
• ISSN: 1931-1168; 1947-1629
• DOI: 10.1109/ASPAA.2007.4392976

Most real microphone-array applications require sound sources to be localized in a noisy, reverberant environment. In such conditions, the steered response power using the phase transform (SRP-PHAT) has been shown to be more robust than faster, two-stage, time-difference of arrival methods. The complication is that the SRP-PHAT space has many local extrema which has required computationally costly grid-search methods. In this paper, we introduce the use of coarse-to-fine region contraction (CFRC) to make computing the SRP practical. We compare CFRC cost and performance to that of using stochastic region contraction (SRC), a method we presented recently at ICASSP 2007, which showed the computation for SRC was reduced by about 3 orders of magnitude from a comparatively fine grid-search. Results here from real data from human talkers show that CFRC costs about the same as SRC overall, but requires only about 63% of SRC's cost under very noisy conditions.