Acoustic source location in a three-dimensional space using crosspower spectrum phase

A microphone array can be used to locate a dominant acoustic source in a given environment. This capability is successfully employed to locate an active talker in teleconferencing or other multi-speaker applications. In this work the source location is obtained in two steps: (1) a time difference of arrival (TDOA) computation between the signals of the array; (2) an “optimal” source location based on the interchannel delay estimates and on a geometrical description of the sensor arrangement. The crosspower spectrum phase technique was used for TDOA estimation, while a maximum likelihood approach was followed to derive the source coordinates. Source location experiments in a three-dimensional space were performed by means of an array of 8 microphones. For this purpose both a loudspeaker and a real talker were used to collect data in a large noisy and reverberant room