Local Relative Transfer Function for Sound Source Localization

Xiaofei Li (1) , Radu Horaud (1) , Laurent Girin (2, 1) , Sharon Gannot (3, 1)

1 PERCEPTION - Interpretation and Modelling of Images and Videos
2 GIPSA-CRISSP - GIPSA - Cognitive Robotics, Interactive Systems, & Speech Processing
3 Bar-Ilan University [Israël]

The relative transfer function (RTF), i.e. the ratio of acoustic transfer functions between two sensors, can be used for sound source localization / beamforming based on a microphone array. The RTF is usually defined with respect to a unique reference sensor. Choosing the reference sensor may be a difficult task, especially for dynamic acoustic environment and setup. In this paper we propose to use a locally normalized RTF, in short local-RTF, as an acoustic feature to characterize the source direction. Local-RTF takes a neighbor sensor as the reference channel for a given sensor. The estimated local-RTF vector can thus avoid the bad effects of a noisy unique reference and have smaller estimation error than conventional RTF estimators. We propose two estimators for the local-RTF and concatenate the values across sensors and frequencies to form a high-dimensional vector which is utilized for source localization. Experiments with real-world signals show the interest of this approach.

Mots clés: sound source localization; relative transfer function; microphone array

Domaines: Vision par ordinateur et reconnaissance de formes [cs.CV]

Xiaofei Li, Radu Horaud, Laurent Girin, Sharon Gannot. Local Relative Transfer Function for Sound Source Localization. EUSIPCO 2015 - 23th European Signal Processing Conference, Aug 2015, Nice, France. pp.399-403, ⟨10.1109/EUSIPCO.2015.7362413⟩. ⟨hal-01163675⟩