DOA estimation of multiple sources using arbitrary microphone array configuration in the presence of spatial aliasing

Direction-of-arrival (DOA) estimation of sound sources by using microphone array is an important technique. Its applications are teleconference system and human-robot communicating system and so on. This paper describes a DOA estimation method using array with arbitrary 3-dimentional configuration. The problem discussed in this study is the case in the presence of spatial aliasing. The proposed method is based on sparseness in time-frequency domain of speech signal. The phase uncertainty caused by spatial aliasing can be solved by selecting reliable time-frequency sells whose propagating vector is mostly close to the unit sphere. Through conducted experiments, the proposed method is proved to estimate more accurately than the conventional methods such as histogram and k-means clustering algorithm. Based on the kernel density algorithm stable accurate estimation of DOA can be realized.