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This correspondence reports on the use of crosspowerspectrum phase (CSP) analysis as an accurate time delay estimation (TDE) technique. It is used in a microphone array system for the location of acoustic events in noisy and reverberant environments. A corresponding coherence measure (CM) and its graphical representation are introduced to show TDE accuracy. Using a two-microphone pair array, real experiments show less than 10 cm average location error in a 6 m 2 6 m area.

A linear four microphone array can be employed for acoustic event location in a real environment using an accurate time delay estimation.This paper refers to the use of a specific technique, based on Crosspower Spectrum Phase (CSP) analysis, that yielded accurate location performance. The behavior of this technique is investigated under different noise and reverberation conditions.Real experiments as well as simulations were conducted to analyze a wide variety of situations. Results show system robustness at quite critical environmental conditions.

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This paper describes a novel approach for localization of multiple sources overlapping in time. The proposed algorithm relies on acoustic maps computed in multi-microphone settings, which are descriptions of the distribution of the acoustic activity in a monitored area. Through a proper processing of the acoustic maps, the positions of two or more simultaneously active acoustic sources can be estimated in a robust way. Experimental results obtained on real data collected for this specific task show the capabilities of the given method both with distributed microphone networks and with compact arrays.

The availability of realistic simulated corpora is of key importance for the future progress of distant speech recognition technology. The reliability, flexibility and low computational cost of a data simulation process may ultimately allow researchers to train, tune and test different techniques in a variety of acoustic scenarios, avoiding the laborious effort of directly recording real data from the targeted environment.In the last decade, several simulated corpora have been released to the research community, including the data-sets distributed in the context of projects and international challenges, such as CHiME and REVERB. These efforts were extremely useful to derive baselines and common evaluation frameworks for comparison purposes. At the same time, in many cases they highlighted the need of a better coherence between real and simulated conditions.In this paper, we examine this issue and we describe our approach to the generation of realistic corpora in a domestic context. Experimental validation, conducted in a multimicrophone scenario, shows that a comparable performance trend can be observed with both real and simulated data across different recognition frameworks, acoustic models, as well as multi-microphone processing techniques.

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