Acoustic source tracking in reverberant environment using regional steered response power measurement

Acoustic source localization and tracking using a microphone array is challenging due to the presence of background noise and room reverberation. Conventional algorithms employ the steered response power (SRP) as the measurement function in a particle filter based tracking framework. The particle weight is updated according to a pseudo-likelihood derived from the SRP value of each particle position. The performance of this approach reduces in a noisy and reverberant environment. In this paper, instead of evaluating the SRP value for each discrete particle position, we propose to apply a regional SRP beamformer which takes into account a circular region centered on each particle position, in order to provide a more robust particle likelihood evaluation. In addition, a proper mapping function is proposed to transform the regional SRP value to the likelihood. Simulation results show that the proposed method achieves robustness in tracking a speech source in a noisy and reverberant environment.