Multisource localization based on angle distribution of time–frequency points using an FOA microphone

Abstract

Multisource localization occupies an important position in the field of acoustic signal processing and is widely applied in scenarios, such as human‐machine interaction and spatial acoustic parameter acquisition. The direction‐of‐arrival (DOA) of a sound source is convenient to render spatial sound in the audio metaverse. A multisource localization method in a reverberation environment is proposed based on the angle distribution of time–frequency (TF) points using a first‐order ambisonics (FOA) microphone. The method is implemented in three steps. 1) By exploring the angle distribution of TF points, a single‐source zone (SSZ) detection method is proposed by using a standard deviation‐based measure, which reveals the degree of convergence of TF point angles in a zone. 2) To reduce the effect of outliers on localization, an outlier removal method is designed to remove the TF points whose angles are far from the real DOAs, where the median angle of each detected zone is adopted to construct the outlier set. 3) DOA estimates of multiple sources are obtained by postprocessing of the angle histogram. Experimental results in both the simulated and real scenarios verify the effectiveness of the proposed method in a reverberation environment, which also show that the proposed method outperforms reference methods.