A robust statistical-based speaker's location detection algorithm in a vehicular environment

Abstract

This work presents a robust speaker's location detection algorithm using a single linear microphone array that is capable of detecting multiple speech sources under the assumption that there exist nonoverlapped speech segments among sources. Namely, the overlapped speech segments are treated as uncertainty and are not used for detection. The location detection algorithm is derived from a previous work ( 2006), where Gaussian mixture models (GMMs) are used to model location-dependent and content and speaker-independent phase difference distributions. The proposed algorithm is proven to be robust against the complex vehicular acoustics including noise, reverberation, near-filed, far-field, line-of-sight, and non-line-of-sight conditions, and microphones' mismatch. An adaptive system architecture is developed to adjust the Gaussian mixture ( GM) location model to environmental noises. To deal with unmodeled speech sources as well as overlapped speech signals, a threshold adaptation scheme is proposed in this work. Experimental results demonstrate high detection accuracy in a noisy vehicular environment.