Sound mapping in reverberant rooms by a robust direct method

Direct methods estimate the position of an acoustic source by sampling the environment through a set of properly placed microphones. SRP-Phat is probably the most popular direct method. It is based on computation of the generalized cross- correlation (GCC) of signals on a grid of preselected points. Anyway, in the presence of reverberation, the functional employed by SRP-Phat can be very irregular from point to point, thus making the source localization a difficult task. In this paper, a new functional is presented that regularizes the SRP- Phat approach and makes it more efficient the use of optimization algorithms to further refine the source position estimation. After a brief introduction, the proposed approach is described and compared to SRP-Phat on simulated and real data at different reverberation levels.