Multiple Sound Source Localization Based on Inter-Channel Correlation Using a Distributed Microphone System in a Real Environment

In real environments, the presence of ambient noise and room reverberations seriously degrades the accuracy in sound source localization. In addition, conventional sound source localization methods cannot localize multiple sound sources accurately in real noisy environments. This paper proposes a new method of multiple sound source localization using a distributed microphone system that is a recording system with multiple microphones dispersed to a wide area. The proposed method localizes a sound source by finding the position that maximizes the accumulated correlation coefficient between multiple channel pairs. After the estimation of the first sound source, a typical pattern of the accumulated correlation for a single sound source is subtracted from the observed distribution of the accumulated correlation. Subsequently, the second sound source is searched again. To evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed method, experiments of two sound source localization were carried out in an office room. The result shows that sound source localization accuracy is about 99.7%. The proposed method could realize the multiple sound source localization robustly and stably. key words: real environment, multiple sound sources, sound source localization, distributed microphone system, inter-channel correlation, TDOA