Determination of the number of wideband acoustical sources in a reverberant environment

This paper addresses the problem of determining the number of wideband sources in a reverberant environment. In [1] an Exponential Fitting Test (EFT) is proposed based on the exponential profile of the noise only eigenvalues. We consider the performance of this test for the problem in question, and compare it with the results achieved by the well known Akaike Information Criterion (AIC) and Minimum Description Length (MDL). Once reverberation is present in the received signals the EFT is seen to perform much better than the AIC and MDL.