• Journal of the Institute of Electronics and Information Engineers
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• v.54 no.2
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• pp.123-129
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• 2017

This paper proposes a new nonnegative matrix factorization (NMF) based direction-of-arrival (DOA) estimation method for multiple sound sources using a dual microphone array. First of all, sound signals coming from the dual microphone array are segmented into consecutive analysis frames, and a steered-response power phase transform (SRP-PHAT) beamformer is applied to each frame so that stereo signals of each frame are represented in a time-direction domain. The time-direction outputs of SRP-PHAT are stored for a pre-defined number of frames, which is referred to as a time-direction block. Next, In order to estimate DOAs robust to noise, each time-direction block is normalized along the time by using a block subtraction technique. After that, an unsupervised NMF method is applied to the normalized time-direction block in order to cluster the directions of each sound source in a multiple sound source environments. In particular, the activation and basis matrices are used to estimate the number of sound sources and their DOAs, respectively. The DOA estimation performance of the proposed method is evaluated by measuring a mean absolute error (MAE) and the standard deviation of errors between the oracle and estimated DOAs under a three source condition, where the sources are located in [$-35{\circ}$, 5m], [$12{\circ}$, 4m], and [$38{\circ}$, 4.m] from the dual microphone array. It is shown from the experiment that the proposed method could relatively reduce MAE by 56.83%, compared to a conventional SRP-PHAT based DOA estimation method.

• Proceedings of the KSPS conference
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• 2006.11a
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• pp.88-91
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• 2006

Steered response power(SRP) based algorithm uses a focused beamformer which steers the array to various locations and searches for a peak in output power to localize sound sources. SRP-PHAT, a phase transformed SRP, shows high accuracy, but requires a large amount of computation time. This paper proposes an algorithm that clusters search spaces in advance to reduce computation time of SRP based algorithms.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.15 no.3
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• pp.17-28
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• 2008

In many practical applications of robots, finding the location of an incoming sound is an important issue for the development of efficient human robot interface. Most sound source localization algorithms make use of only those microphones that are acoustically visible from the sound source or do not take into account the effect of sound diffraction, thereby degrading the sound source localization performance. This paper proposes a new sound source localization method that can utilize those microphones that are acoustically shadowed from the sound source. The experiment results show that use of the acoustically shadowed microphones, which receive higher signal-to-noise ratio signals than the others and are closer to the sound source, improves the performance of sound source localization.