The LOCATA Challenge Data Corpus for Acoustic Source Localization and Tracking

• Published in: Proceedings of the IEEE Sensor Array and Multichannel Signal Processing Workshop pp. 410 - 414
• Main Authors: Lollmann, Heinrich W., Evers, Christine, Schmidt, Alexander, Mellmann, Heinrich, Barfuss, Hendrik, Naylor, Patrick A., Kellermann, Walter
• Format: Conference Proceeding
• Language: English
• Published: IEEE 01.07.2018
• Subjects: Acoustics; Array signal processing; Arrays; Microphone arrays; Task analysis
• ISSN: 2151-870X
• DOI: 10.1109/SAM.2018.8448644

Algorithms for acoustic source localization and tracking are essential for a wide range of applications such as personal assistants, smart homes, tele-conferencing systems, hearing aids, or autonomous systems. Numerous algorithms have been proposed for this purpose which, however, are not evaluated and compared against each other by using a common database so far. The IEEE-AASP Challenge on sound source localization and tracking (LOCATA) provides a novel, comprehensive data corpus for the objective benchmarking of state-of-the-art algorithms on sound source localization and tracking. The data corpus comprises six tasks ranging from the localization of a single static sound source with a static microphone array to the tracking of multiple moving speakers with a moving microphone array. It contains real-world multichannel audio recordings, obtained by hearing aids, microphones integrated in a robot head, a planar and a spherical microphone array in an enclosed acoustic environment, as well as positional information about the involved arrays and sound sources represented by moving human talkers or static loudspeakers.