An integration of source location cues for speech clustering in distributed microphone arrays

We propose a new approach for clustering competing speech sources using distributed microphone arrays. In this approach, we first define two feature vectors where the first captures the intra-node location information while the second captures the level difference of speech energy recorded at different nodes. Then, we introduce Watson and Dirichlet mixture models to model the first and second features, respectively. We integrate both types of information in an expectation maximization algorithm to cluster the simultaneous speech sources. The performance of the proposed approach is superior to best node selection and comparable to centralized processing in terms of conventional blind source separation metrics.