Efficient and Microphone-Fault-Tolerant 3D Sound Source Localization

TL;DR

This paper presents a novel 3D sound source localization framework that is accurate, computationally efficient, and robust to microphone faults, suitable for real-world, resource-constrained environments.

Contribution

It introduces a new SSL framework using sparse cross-attention, pretraining, and adaptive metrics, with fault-tolerance and scalability for multi-source localization.

Findings

Achieves accurate 3D localization with fewer microphones.

Demonstrates robustness to microphone position errors.

Scales effectively for multiple sound sources.

Abstract

Sound source localization (SSL) is a critical technology for determining the position of sound sources in complex environments. However, existing methods face challenges such as high computational costs and precise calibration requirements, limiting their deployment in dynamic or resource-constrained environments. This paper introduces a novel 3D SSL framework, which uses sparse cross-attention, pretraining, and adaptive signal coherence metrics, to achieve accurate and computationally efficient localization with fewer input microphones. The framework is also fault-tolerant to unreliable or even unknown microphone position inputs, ensuring its applicability in real-world scenarios. Preliminary experiments demonstrate its scalability for multi-source localization without requiring additional hardware. This work advances SSL by balancing the model's performance and efficiency and improving its robustness for real-world scenarios.