Localization of Sound Sources in a Room with One Microphone

TL;DR

This paper presents a novel method for localizing sound sources in a room using only a single microphone by exploiting room transfer function properties and sparsity in 3D space.

Contribution

It introduces a new approach that enables 3D sound source localization with one microphone, unlike traditional array-based methods.

Findings

Effective 3D localization within known room geometry

Utilizes sparsity in voxel space for source detection

Provides design guidelines for sensing matrix

Abstract

Estimation of the location of sound sources is usually done using microphone arrays. Such settings provide an environment where we know the difference between the received signals among different microphones in the terms of phase or attenuation, which enables localization of the sound sources. In our solution we exploit the properties of the room transfer function in order to localize a sound source inside a room with only one microphone. The shape of the room and the position of the microphone are assumed to be known. The design guidelines and limitations of the sensing matrix are given. Implementation is based on the sparsity in the terms of voxels in a room that are occupied by a source. What is especially interesting about our solution is that we provide localization of the sound sources not only in the horizontal plane, but in the terms of the 3D coordinates inside the room.