Joint Spatio-Temporal Filtering Methods for DOA and Fundamental Frequency Estimation

In this paper, spatio-temporal filtering methods are proposed for estimating the direction-of-arrival (DOA) and fundamental frequency of periodic signals, like those produced by the speech production system and many musical instruments using microphone arrays. This topic has quite recently received some attention in the community and is quite promising for several applications. The proposed methods are based on optimal, adaptive filters that leave the desired signal, having a certain DOA and fundamental frequency, undistorted and suppress everything else. The filtering methods simultaneously operate in space and time, whereby it is possible resolve cases that are otherwise problematic for pitch estimators or DOA estimators based on beamforming. Several special cases and improvements are considered, including a method for estimating the covariance matrix based on the recently proposed iterative adaptive approach (IAA). Experiments demonstrate the improved performance of the proposed methods under adverse conditions compared to the state of the art using both synthetic signals and real signals, as well as illustrate the properties of the methods and the filters.