Speaker orientation estimation based on hybridation of GCC-PHAT and HLBR

This paper presents a novel approach to speaker orientation estimation in a SmartRoom environment equipped with multiple microphones. The ratio between the high and low band energies (HLBR) received at each microphone has been shown in our previous work to be a potentially approach to estimate the direction of the voice produced by a speaker. In this work, for each microphone pair, a smoothed CPS phase is obtained by a proper windowing of the main peak of the crosscorrelation sequence estimated with the GCC-PHAT method, and a HLBR is computed from the processed CPS. The proposed method keeps the computational simplicity of the HLBR algorithm while adding the robustness offered by the GCCPHAT technique. Experimental preliminary results were conducted over a database recorded purposely in the UPC Smart room, and over the CLEAR head pose database. The proposed method performs consistently better than other state-of-the-art techniques with both databases.