Sound Source Localization in a Reverberant Room Using Harmonic Based Music

The localization of acoustic sound sources is beneficial to signal processing applications of speech enhancement, dereverberation, separation and tracking. Difficulties in position estimation arise in real world environments due to coherent reflections degrading performance of subspace localization techniques. This paper proposes a method of multiple signal classification (MUSIC) subspace localization, which is suitable for reverberant rooms. The method is based on the modal decomposition of a room’s region-to-region transfer function, which is assumed to be known. We perform a numerical simulation of four sound sources in a reverberant room, and show that the localization method exhibits increased spatial resolution and distance focusing abilities when the region-to-region transfer function is incorporated. The proposed method is successful in estimating three-dimensional sound source positions without distortion due to reverberation.