Multiple acoustic sources localization using distributed expectation-maximization algorithm

The challenge of localizing number of concurrent acoustic sources in reverberant enclosures is addressed in this paper. We formulate the localization task as a maximum likelihood (ML) parameter estimation problem, and develop a distributed expectation-maximization (DEM) procedure, based on the Incremental EM (IEM) framework. The algorithm enables localization of the speakers without a center point. Unlike direction search, localization is a distributed task in nature, since the sensors must be spatially deployed. Taking advantage of the distributed constellation of the sensors we propose a distributed algorithm that enables multiple processing nodes and considers communication constraints between them. The proposed DEM has surprising advantages over conventional expectation-maximization (EM) schemes. Firstly, it is less sensitive to initial conditions. Secondly, it converges much faster than the conventional EM. The proposed algorithm is tested by an extensive simulation study.