Energy-based sound source localization and gain normalization for ad hoc microphone arrays

  • Zicheng Liu ,
  • Zhengyou Zhang ,
  • Li-wei He ,
  • Philip A. Chou

IEEE Int'l Conf. Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing |

Published by Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc.

We present an energy-based technique to estimate both microphone and speaker/talker locations from an ad hoc network of microphones. An example of such ad hoc microphone network is a set of microphones built in the laptops that some meeting participants bring in a meeting room. Compared with traditional sound source localization approaches based on time of flight, our technique
does not require accurate synchronization, and it does not require each laptop to emit special signals. We estimate the meeting participants’ positions based on average energies of their speech
signals. In addition, we present a technique, which is independent of the volumes of the speakers, to estimate the relative gains of the microphones. This is crucial to aggregate various audio channels from the ad hoc microphone network into a single stream for audio conferencing.