Tracking multiple acoustic sources using particle filtering

In this paper we deal with the problem of localizing and tracking multiple acoustic sources by means of microphones pairs. We assume that the propagation takes place in a reverberating environment such as an office room. The problem is tackled by combining two well known techniques. First, for each pair of microphones, source de-mixing is carried out using the TRINICON algorithm. TRINICON exploits the fact that the original sources are statistically independent in order to estimate appropriate de-mixing filters. The impulse responses of such filters exhibit peaks related to the TDOA (Time Difference of Arrival) of each microphones pair. In the second step, such observations are combined using a particle filter with a dynamic model representing the positions and the velocities of the sources. Simulations demonstrate that the proposed system enables to accurately tracking moving acoustic sources in reverberating environments (±10cm in a 5m × 5m room with T₆₀ ≤ 0.450s).