This paper presents a novel approach for indoor acoustic source localization using sensor arrays. The proposed solution starts by defining a generative model, designed to explain the acoustic power maps obtained by Steered Response Power (SRP) strategies. An optimization approach is then proposed to fit the model to real input SRP data and estimate the position of the acoustic source. Adequately fitting the model to real SRP data, where noise and other unmodelled effects distort the ideal signal, is the core contribution of the paper. Two basic strategies in the optimization are proposed. First, sparse constraints in the parameters of the model are included, enforcing the number of simultaneous active sources to be limited. Second, subspace analysis is used to filter out portions of the input signal that cannot be explained by the model. Experimental results on a realistic speech database show statistically significant localization error reductions of up to 30% when compared with the SRP-PHAT strategies.

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Measuring the Time delay of Arrival (TDOA) between a set of sensors is the basic setup for many applications, such as localization or signal beamforming. This paper presents the set of TDOA matrices, which are built from noise-free TDOA measurements, not requiring knowledge of the sensor array geometry. We prove that TDOA matrices are rank-two and have a special SVD decomposition that leads to a compact linear parametric representation. Properties of TDOA matrices are applied in this paper to perform denoising, by finding the TDOA matrix closest to the matrix composed with noisy measurements. The paper shows that this problem admits a closed-form solution for TDOA measurements contaminated with Gaussian noise which extends to the case of having missing data. The paper also proposes a novel robust denoising method resistant to outliers, missing data and inspired in recent advances in robust low-rank estimation. Experiments in synthetic and real datasets show significant improvements of the proposed denoising algorithms in TDOA-based localization, both in terms of TDOA accuracy estimation and localization error.

We propose a novel formulation of the generalized cross correlation with phase transform (GCC-PHAT) for a pair of microphones in diffuse sound field. This formulation elucidates the links between the microphone distances and the GCC-PHAT output. Hence, it leads to a new model that enables estimation of the pairwise distances by optimizing over the distances best matching the GCC-PHAT observations. Furthermore, the relation of this model to the coherence function is elaborated along with the dependency on the signal bandwidth. The experiments conducted on real data recordings demonstrate the theories and support the effectiveness of the proposed method.

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