A probabilistic framework for multiple speaker localization

This paper presents a novel probabilistic framework for localizing multiple speakers with a microphone array. In this framework, the generalized cross correlation function (GCC) of each microphone pair is interpreted as a probability distribution of the time difference of arrival (TDOA) and subsequently approximated as a Gaussian mixture. The distribution parameters are estimated with a weighted expectation maximization algorithm. Then, the joint distribution of the TDOA Gaussian mixtures is mapped to a multimodal distribution in the location space, where each mode represents a potential source location. The approach taken here performs the localization by 1) reducing the search space to some regions that are likely to contain a source and then 2) extracting the actual speaker locations with a numerical optimization algorithm. The effectiveness of the proposed approach is shown using the AV16.3 corpus.