Abstract-In this work, a multiple sound source localization and counting method is presented, that imposes relaxed sparsity constraints on the source signals. A uniform circular microphone array is used to overcome the ambiguities of linear arrays, however the underlying concepts (sparse component analysis and matching pursuit-based operation on the histogram of estimates) are applicable to any microphone array topology. Our method is based on detecting time-frequency (TF) zones where one source is dominant over the others. Using appropriately selected TF components in these "single-source" zones, the proposed method jointly estimates the number of active sources and their corresponding directions of arrival (DOAs) by applying a matching pursuit-based approach to the histogram of DOA estimates. The method is shown to have excellent performance for DOA estimation and source counting, and to be highly suitable for real-time applications due to its low complexity. Through simulations (in various signal-to-noise ratio conditions and reverberant environments) and real environment experiments, we indicate that our method outperforms other state-of-the-art DOA and source counting methods in terms of accuracy, while being significantly more efficient in terms of computational complexity.

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Abstract-Recently, we proposed an approach inspired by Sparse Component Analysis for real-time localization of multiple sound sources using a circular microphone array. The method was based on identifying time-frequency zones where only one source is active, reducing the problem to single-source localization for these zones. A histogram of estimated Directions of Arrival (DOAs) was formed and then processed to obtain improved DOA estimates, assuming that the number of sources was known. In this paper, we extend our previous work by proposing three different methods for counting the number of sources by looking for prominent peaks in the derived histogram based on: (a) performing a peak search, (b) processing an LPC-smoothed version of the histogram, (c) employing a matching pursuitbased approach. The third approach is shown to perform very accurately in simulated reverberant conditions and additive noise, and its computational requirements are very small.