Active Microphone with Parabolic Reflection Board for Estimation of Sound Source Direction

This paper introduces a concept of an active microphone that achieves a good combination of active-operation and signal processing, where a new sound-source-direction estimation method using only a single microphone with a parabolic reflection board is proposed. In our previous work [1], we proposed GMM (Gaussian Mixture Model) separation for estimation of the sound source direction, where the observed (reverberant) speech is separated into the acoustic transfer function and the clean speech GMM. However, the previous method required the measurement of speech for each room environment in advance. The new proposed method using parabolic reflection is able to estimate the sound source direction without any prior measurements. Its effectiveness is confirmed by sound-source-direction estimation experiments on white noise in a room environment.