High performance 3D sound localization for surveillance applications

One of the key features of the human auditory system, is its nearly constant omni-directional sensitivity, e.g., the system reacts to alerting signals coming from a direction away from the sight of focused visual attention. In many surveillance situations where visual attention completely fails since the robot cameras have no direct line of sight with the sound sources, the ability to estimate the direction of the sources of danger relying on sound becomes extremely important. We present in this paper a novel method for sound localization in azimuth and elevation based on a humanoid head. The method was tested in simulations as well as in a real reverberant environment. Compared to state-of-the-art localization techniques the method is able to localize with high accuracy 3D sound sources even in the presence of reflections and high distortion.