Direction of arrival estimation for speech sources using fourth order cross cumulants

In many applications where speech separation and enhancement is of interest, e.g. conferencing systems, mobile phones and hearing aids, accurate speaker localization is important. This paper presents an alternative criteria for the well known steered response power with phase transform (SRP-PHAT) algorithm, in which the steered response relates to peaks in the fourth order cross cumulant, rather than peaks in the second order cross cumulant, i.e. the cross power spectrum. Since speech sources have a probability density function (PDF) close to the Laplacian distribution and noise are generally closer to the Gaussian distribution, the fourth order cumulant becomes a good alternative for the steered response search for speech sources. The proposed method is evaluated and compared to the original SRP-PHAT algorithm and shows significant improvements in localization performance for speech sources.