Tracking of multiple moving speakers with multiple microphone arrays

In this paper we use multiple microphone arrays to fuse the location estimate from each microphone array which yields an improved estimate of the positions and velocities of multiple, simultaneously active, moving speakers based on time delay of arrivals (TDOAs). Our approach: 1) incorporates kinematic information of moving speakers by using an interacting multiple model (IMM) estimator for each speaker in order to constrain the evolution of the location measurements; 2) fuses the location estimates of the same speaker from multiple microphone arrays for better acoustical coverage of the sensed environment, and 3) directly accounts for the measurement origin uncertainty, i.e., which measurement comes from which speaker by using the probabilistic data association (PDA) technique with the IMM estimator. We demonstrate that a network of arrays combined with the estimation technique widely used in multisensor multitarget tracking area provides a consistent and coherent way to reduce the uncertainty and ambiguity of measurements. The effectiveness of our approach is illustrated by extensive simulation study on tracking a single moving speaker and two closely-spaced speakers with a crossing segment in their trajectories.