Effect of head orientation on the speaker localization performance in smart-room environment

Reliable measures of speaker positions are needed for computational perception of human activities taking place in a smart-room environment. In this work, we investigate the effect of talkers head orientation on the accuracy of acoustical source localization techniques and its relation with the talker directivity pattern and room reverberation. Two different representative speaker localization techniques are assessed, steered response power and a crossing lines based method, in both cases on the basis of the estimated delays between pairs of microphones with the GCC-PHAT algorithm. A small database has been collected at the UPC’s smart room for evaluation. The results show how the localization error heavily depends on the head orientation, and also the fact that the space exploration based technique is much more robust to head orientation changes than the crossing lines technique, due to the way the contributions from the various microphones are combined.