Particle filter beamforming for acoustic source localization in a reverberant environment

Traditional acoustic source localization uses a two-step procedure requiring intermediate time-delay estimates from pairs of microphones. An alternative single-step approach is proposed in this paper in which particle filtering is used to estimate the source location through steered beamforming. This scheme is especially attractive in speech enhancement applications, where the localization estimates are typically used to steer a beamformer at a later stage. Simulation results show that the algorithm is robust to reverberation, and is able to accurately follow the source trajectory.