SMP-PHAT: Lightweight DoA Estimation by Merging Microphone Pairs

TL;DR

SMP-PHAT is a lightweight sound source localization method that merges microphone pairs to reduce computational complexity without sacrificing accuracy, suitable for low-cost hardware.

Contribution

The paper introduces SMP-PHAT, a novel DoA estimation technique that merges parallel microphone pairs to decrease computational load while maintaining accuracy.

Findings

Reduces computational load by up to 39%.

Maintains accuracy comparable to SRP-PHAT.

Effective on low-cost hardware with common microphone arrays.

Abstract

This paper introduces SMP-PHAT, which performs direction of arrival (DoA) of sound estimation with a microphone array by merging pairs of microphones that are parallel in space. This approach reduces the number of pairwise cross-correlation computations, and brings down the number of flops and memory lookups when searching for DoA. Experiments on low-cost hardware with commonly used microphone arrays show that the proposed method provides the same accuracy as the former SRP-PHAT approach, while reducing the computational load by 39% in some cases.