Generalized crosspower-spectrum phase method

Sound source localization based on a microphone array can be used in telephone or video conference systems to detect the speaker´s location. A method based on time difference of arrival (TDOA) estimation is an ideal candidate as an effective method for sound source localization. Time delay estimation (TDE) and source localization are two main factors of it. The crosspower-spectrum phase (CSP) method is a popular TDE technique in sound source localization based on microphone arrays. The relatively precise TDE can be achieved by using the CSP method in the presence of weak noise and reverberation. The performance degrades dramatically in the case of low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and strong reverberation. A generalized CSP (GCSP) method for TDE is proposed to improve the performance of CSP. The weighting function of GCSP is estimated from the multi-channel signals of the microphone array. Simulation results show that the proposed method outperforms the CSP method.