Multispeaker direction of arrival tracking for multimodal source separation of moving sources

An improvement is proposed in the audio-visual approach to solve the problem of source separation of physically moving speakers by exploiting multiple video cameras, a circular microphone array and robust spatial beamforming. The challenge of separating moving sources is that the mixing filters are time varying; as such the unmixing filters should also be time varying but these are difficult to determine from only audio measurements. Therefore the visual modality is utilized to track the direction of each speaker to the microphone array by using a Markov chain Monte Carlo particle filter (MCMC-PF). The proposed direction of arrival (DOA) tracker improves the computational complexity with respect to a previously employed 3-D multi-speaker position tracker. The DOA information is used in a robust least squares frequency invariant data independent (RLSFIDI) beamformer to separate the audio sources. Experimental results show that the proposed technique efficiently tracks the DOA with improved computational complexity and enhanced source separation.