Multisource DOA Estimation in a Reverberant Environment Using a Single Acoustic Vector Sensor

We address the problem of direction-of-arrival (DOA) estimation for multiple speech sources in an enclosed environment using a single acoustic vector sensor. The challenges in such scenario include reverberation and overlapping of the source signals. In this work, we exploit low-reverberant-single-source (LRSS) points in the time-frequency (TF) domain, where a particular source is dominant with high signal-to-reverberation ratio. Unlike conventional algorithms having limitation that such potential points need to be detected at “TF-zone” level, the proposed algorithm performs LRSS detection at “TF-point” level. Therefore, for the proposed algorithm, the potential LRSS points need not be neighbors of each other within a TF zone to be detected, resulting an increased number of detected LRSS points. The detected LRSS points are further screened by an outlier removal step such that only reliable LRSS points will be used for DOA estimation. Simulations and experiments were conducted to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm in multisource reverberant environments.