A design of audio-visual talker tracking system based on CSP analysis and frame difference in real noisy environments

It is very important to capture the distant-talking speech with high-quality for voice-controlled systems or teleconferencing systems. A microphone array steering is an ideal candidate for this purpose. However, for the microphone array steering, it is necessary to track the target talker. Conventional talker tracking algorithms with audio signal only (ex. CSP (cross-power spectrum phase) analysis) have a difficulty estimating the target talker direction accurately in higher noisy environments. To overcome this problem, we propose a new target talker tracking algorithm that not only utilize the audio signal, but also utilize the visual signal. The proposed algorithm is based on integration of CSP analysis with audio signal and frame difference with visual signal. As a result of evaluation experiments in a real room, we confirmed that the proposed algorithm could track the target talker accurately than the conventional algorithm.