Improved steered response power method for sound source localization based on principal eigenvector

Sound source localization is essential in many microphone arrays application, ranging from teleconferencing systems to artificial perception in a reverberant noisy environment. The steered response power (SRP) using the phase transform (SRP-PHAT) source localization algorithm has been proved robust, however, the performance of the SRP-PHAT algorithm degrades in highly reverberant noisy environment. Though the SRP-based maximum likelihood localizers are more robust than SRP-PHAT, they have the drawback of requiring noise variance to be estimated in a silent room. This paper presents an improved SRP-PHAT algorithm based on principal eigenvector. Sound source location is estimated from the principal eigenvector computed from the frequency-domain correlation matrix. Using both simulated and real data, we show that the proposed algorithm achieves higher source localization accuracy compared to the SRP-PHAT algorithm.