Voice Activity Detection within the Nearfield of an Array of Distributed Microphones

In this paper a voice activity detector (VAD) for sources within the near-field of an array of distributed microphones is presented. We develop this detector with neither exact knowledge of the desired source nor microphone arrangement. The potential of the presented method is evaluated on a setup with belt- and classical hands-free microphones and is compared to a well-known detection method based on the generalized crosscorrelation.