Fast steered response power source localization using inverse mapping of relative delays

The acoustic source localization problem has significance for modern intelligent communication systems and future human-computer interaction applications. Although steered-beamforming localization methods perform well in adverse conditions, the algorithms are inherently computationally burdensome due to their need to search the entire location space. This paper presents a computationally- reduced version of the steered response power (SRP) method. The proposed approach is rooted in the inverse mapping of relative delays to candidate source locations, which allows for the transformation of the iterative search from the multidimensional location space to the one-dimensional relative delay space. By subsetting the set of traversed relative delays to only those that experience a high-level of cross-correlation, the computational load is reduced by up to 90 % without incurring a loss in localization accuracy.