Robust speaker localization using a microphone array
Norbert K. Strobel, Rudolf Rabenstein · 2000
This paper presents a speaker localization system using a microphone array. The array is operated as a steered lter-and-sum beamformer implemented as a summed correlator. In particular, we emphasize the use of a speech pause detector to improve the robustness of the speaker localization system by avoiding erroneous position estimates when no speech signal is present. Simulation results and measurements show that speech pause detection improves the overall system performance considerably. 1 Introduction For acoustic speaker localization, we use a number of spatially distributed microphone sensors to capture incoming sound waves. If the amplitude gradient across the microphone array is negligible, the time delays between dierent microphone signals can be expressed in terms of the unknown source location parameters. Speaker localization is related to the classical sonar target detection problem already described in [1, 2]. However, these early references are not directly applicable to...