Source Localization in Reverberant Environments by Consistent Peak Selection

Acoustic source localization in the presence of reverberation is a difficult task. Conventional approaches, based on time delay estimation performed by generalized cross correlation (GCC) on a set of microphone pairs, followed by geometric triangulation, are often unsatisfactory. Prefiltering is usually adopted to reduce the spurious peaks due to reflections. In this work an alternative strategy is proposed, based on the concept that secondary peaks of the GCCs can be crucial in order to correctly locate the source. More specifically, an iterative weighting procedure is introduced, based on the rationale that peaks corresponding to the actual source position should be consistently weighted. The position estimate is then refined by use of an effective and fast clustering technique. Experimental results on simulated data demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed solution.