GCC-PHAT based Head Orientation Estimation

This work presents a novel two-step algorithm to estimate the orientation of speakers in a smart-room environment equipped with microphone arrays. First the position of the speaker is estimated by the SRP-PHAT algorithm, and the time delay of arrival for each microphone pair with respect to the detected position is computed. In the second step, the value of the crosscorrelation at the estimated time delay is used as the fundamental characteristic from where to derive the speaker orientation. The proposed method performs consistently better than other state-of-the-art acoustic techniques with a purposely recorded database and the CLEAR head pose database.