Binaural detection of speech sources in complex acoustic scenes

In this paper we present a novel system that is able to simultaneously localize and detect a predefined number of speech sources in complex acoustic scenes based on binaural signals. The system operates in two steps: First, the acoustic scene is analyzed by a binaural front-end that detects relevant sound source activity. Second, a speech detection module selects source positions from a set of candidate positions that are most likely speech. The proposed method is evaluated in simulated multi-source scenarios consisting of two speech sources, three interfering noise sources and reverberation.