Steered Response Power for Sound Source Localization: A Tutorial Review

TL;DR

This paper reviews the extensive use and development of the Steered Response Power (SRP) method for sound source localization, highlighting its variants, improvements, and providing a modular implementation.

Contribution

It offers a comprehensive review of over 200 papers on SRP, introduces the generalized X-SRP algorithm, and provides a Python implementation with key extensions.

Findings

Extensive review of SRP and its variants

Introduction of the X-SRP generalized algorithm

Provision of a Python implementation with extensions

Abstract

In the last three decades, the Steered Response Power (SRP) method has been widely used for the task of Sound Source Localization (SSL), due to its satisfactory localization performance on moderately reverberant and noisy scenarios. Many works have analyzed and extended the original SRP method to reduce its computational cost, to allow it to locate multiple sources, or to improve its performance in adverse environments. In this work, we review over 200 papers on the SRP method and its variants, with emphasis on the SRP-PHAT method. We also present eXtensible-SRP, or X-SRP, a generalized and modularized version of the SRP algorithm which allows the reviewed extensions to be implemented. We provide a Python implementation of the algorithm which includes selected extensions from the literature.