Relative Acoustic Features for Distance Estimation in Smart-Homes

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel set of relative acoustic features derived from room impulse responses to accurately estimate distances between devices in smart homes, enhancing scene analysis and device selection.

Contribution

It presents a new method for inter-device distance estimation using relative acoustic features and an improved adaptive filtering approach, advancing smart home acoustic sensing.

Findings

Accurate distance estimation in simulated rooms with varying reverberation.

Effective use of relative room impulse response features for device ranging.

Lightweight computational approach suitable for real-time applications.

Abstract

Any audio recording encapsulates the unique fingerprint of the associated acoustic environment, namely the background noise and reverberation. Considering the scenario of a room equipped with a fixed smart speaker device with one or more microphones and a wearable smart device (watch, glasses or smartphone), we employed the improved proportionate normalized least mean square adaptive filter to estimate the relative room impulse response mapping the audio recordings of the two devices. We performed inter-device distance estimation by exploiting a new set of features obtained extending the definition of some acoustic attributes of the room impulse response to its relative version. In combination with the sparseness measure of the estimated relative room impulse response, the relative features allow precise inter-device distance estimation which can be exploited for tasks such as best microphone selection or acoustic scene analysis. Experimental results from simulated rooms of different dimensions and reverberation times demonstrate the effectiveness of this computationally lightweight approach for smart home acoustic ranging applications