Tracking Multiple Speakers with Probabilistic Data Association Filters

In prior work, we developed a speaker tracking system based on an extended Kalman filter using time delays of arrival (TDOAs) as acoustic features. In particular, the TDOAs comprised the observation associated with an iterated extended Kalman filter (IEKF) whose state corresponds to the speaker position. In other work, we followed the same approach to develop a system that could use both audio and video information to track a moving lecturer. While these systems functioned well, their utility was limited to scenarios in which a single speaker was to be tracked. In this work, we seek to remove this restriction by generalizing the IEKF, first to a probabilistic data association filter, which incorporates a clutter model for rejection of spurious acoustic events, and then to a joint probabilistic data association filter (JPDAF), which maintains a separate state vector for each active speaker. In a set of experiments conducted on seminar and meeting data, we demonstrate that the JPDAF provides tracking performance superior to the IEKF.