Acoustic localization enhanced with phase information from modified STFT magnitude

In this paper, we study the effect of noise and reverberation on the phase spectrum and its impact on acoustic localization. In contrast with the existing Generalized Cross Correlation weighting functions that take only the signal´s magnitude into account, we introduce a novel fused approach which also makes use of the phase information. In this approach, the phase spectra of the noise-corrupted microphone array signals are restored by an estimate of the sound source´s phase information obtained from the noise-suppressed STFT magnitude. The proposed approach can be readily combined with any existing weighting function or Time Delay Estimation algorithm. Experimental results demonstrate the potential of this approach and show that it can improve the acoustic localization in joint noisy and reverberant conditions.