Direction of arrival estimation in the spherical harmonic domain using subspace pseudointensity vectors

Moore, Alastair, Evers, Christine and Naylor, Patrick (2017) Direction of arrival estimation in the spherical harmonic domain using subspace pseudointensity vectors. IEEE/ACM Transactions on Audio, Speech, and Language Processing, 25 (1), 178-192. (doi:10.1109/TASLP.2016.2613280).

Abstract

Direction of arrival (DOA) estimation is a fundamental problem in acoustic signal processing. It is used in a diverse range of applications, including spatial filtering, speech dereverberation, source separation and diarization. Intensity vector-based DOA estimation is attractive, especially for spherical sensor arrays, because it is computationally efficient. Two such methods are presented that operate on a spherical harmonic decomposition of a sound field observed using a spherical microphone array. The first uses pseudointensity vectors (PIVs) and works well in acoustic environments where only one sound source is active at any time. The second uses subspace pseudointensity vectors (SSPIVs) and is targeted at environments where multiple simultaneous soures and significant levels of reverberation make the problem more challenging. Analytical models are used to quantify the effects of an interfering source, diffuse noise, and sensor noise on PIVs and SSPIVs. The accuracy of DOA estimation using PIVs and SSPIVs is compared against the state of the art in simulations including realistic reverberation and noise for single and multiple, stationary and moving sources. Finally, robust performance of the proposed methods is demonstrated by using speech recordings in a real acoustic environment.

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Contributors

Author: Christine Evers

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