Speaker localization and tracking in the presence of sound interference by exploiting speech harmonicity

The performance of conventional acoustic source localization and tracking system reduces significantly when reverberation, noise, and acoustic interference are present. In this paper, a robust speaker tracking algorithm for an enclosed environment in the presence of interference and noise is proposed. We exploit the harmonic structure which is a distinctive feature in speech to enhance the robustness against acoustic interference. In order to extract the speech harmonic information, a beamformer is employed to enhance the signal from a prior estimated source location. A new particle weight update is then computed based on the steered response power function given the estimated speech harmonic information. Simulation results show that the proposed method achieves robustness in localization and tracking of a speech source in the presence of interference, noise and reverberation.