Maximum Likelihood Estimation of the Direction of Sound In A Reverberant Noisy Environment

TL;DR

This paper introduces a new method for estimating sound direction in reverberant noisy environments using SNR-adaptive features from acoustic wave decomposition, validated with real microphone data.

Contribution

It presents a novel approach based on sound propagation principles that improves direction estimation in challenging acoustic conditions.

Findings

Effective in reverberant and noisy settings

Works with various microphone array configurations

Validated with real-world data

Abstract

We describe a new method for estimating the direction of sound in a reverberant environment from basic principles of sound propagation. The method utilizes SNR-adaptive features from time-delay and energy of the directional components after acoustic wave decomposition of the observed sound field to estimate the line-of-sight direction under noisy and reverberant conditions. The effectiveness of the approach is established with measured data of different microphone array configurations under various usage scenarios.