Joint recognition and direction-of-arrival estimation of simultaneous meeting-room acoustic events

Acoustic scene analysis usually requires several sub-systems working in parallel for carrying out the various required functionalities. Focusing to a more integrated approach, in this paper we present an attempt to jointly recognize and localize several simultaneous acoustic events that take place in a meeting room environment, by developing a computationally efficient technique that employs multiple arbitrarily-located small microphone arrays. Assuming a set of simultaneous sounds, for each array a matrix is computed whose elements are likelihoods along the set of classes and a set of discretized directions of arrival. MAP estimation is used to decide about both the recognized events and the estimated directions. Experimental results with two sources, one of which is speech, and two three-microphone linear arrays are reported. The recognition results compare favorably with the ones obtained by assuming that the positions are known.