A track before detect approach for sequential Bayesian tracking of multiple speech sources

This paper describes a novel multiple acoustic source tracking method based on track before detect paradigm. Multiple particle filters are used to represent the state of all sources. Sources are detected and removed using a likelihood ratio obtained from particle weights. The weights are obtained by evaluating the likelihood of microphone pair phase difference. Tracking performance from recorded data with rich sequences of speech is presented using multiple object tracking metrics. Results show that the proposed method can detect and track multiple temporally overlapping speech sources as well as switching talkers even in weak signal-to-noise ratios.