Robust sound source localization using a microphone array on a mobile robot

Abstract

The hearing sense on a mobile robot is important because it is omnidirectional and it does not require direct line-of-sight with the sound source. Such capabilities can nicely complement vision to help localize a person or an interesting event in the environment. To do so the robot auditory system must be able to work in noisy, unknown and diverse environmental conditions. In this paper we present a robust sound source localization method in three-dimensional space using an array of 8 microphones. The method is based on time delay of arrival estimation. Results show that a mobile robot can localize in real time different types of sound sources over a range of 3 meters and with a precision of 3 • .

Observation of Vehicle Axles Through Pass-by Noise: A Strategy of Microphone Array Design

“…After (5)- (7), the PHAT processor may be seen as a crosspower spectrum whitening [28] discarding any magnitude information contained in the audio signals. That makes it well adapted to cases in which pairwise amplitude differences cannot be used as a relevant feature for localization, typically when the microphone array has a small aperture in comparison with the distance to the source.…”

Whistle: Synchronization-Free TDOA for Localization

“…Existing work basically use three types of measurements of acoustic signals: TDOA [24], [19], [32], [9], DOA (direction of arrival) [22], [14], [12], [15] and received signal energy [25], [26], [4], [21], [3].…”

“…Moreover, their work is evaluated only by simulation. The work in [32] employs 8 microphones to obtain the TDOA information, which is further used to estimate the bearings of sound sources.…”

HRTF Sound Localization

“…Knowing the geometry (distance between the robot's ears) of the microphones and the delays between microphone pairs, a number of locations for the sound source can be disregarded (Brandstein & Ward, 2001;Kwok et al, 2005;Potamitis et al, 2004;Valin et al, 2003). Then, an HRTF-based localization algorithm only evaluates the remaining possible locations of the source.…”