Robust Speaker Localization in Meeting Room Domain

Speech signal is perturbed in real environments due to room acoustics and noise sources. The speech wavefront is received by a microphone array, which is used to determine the wavefront direction of arrival (DOA). DOA estimates from several spatially separated arrays are used to locate the speaker. Array channels may sometimes be corrupted by noise. In these cases, a DOA estimate may differ from the actual direction of the speaker. Using such estimates in localization could deteriorate the position estimate. A criterion is presented for DOA exclusion. A subset of DOA estimates is chosen that minimizes this criterion. The method is numerically shown to improve localization robustness. Recordings from a real meeting room are studied.