Multi-speaker tracking using multiple distributed microphone arrays

Tracking multiple speakers with microphone arrays is one of the key tasks in smart environments. For good accuracy in reverberant environments, several arrays should be distributed in the room. The method presented is using distributed nodes with microphone arrays that compute local angular speech detections. In an integrating node, these are associated using the spectra and tracks for multiple concurrent speaker are computed. Euclidean coordinates are derived by triangulation, which is improved by a quality based weighting. The method is not only robust against reverberation, but also against transmission errors and jitter. Test with real recordings show that good precision for practical applications can be achieved.