Reverberation-Robust Online Multi-Speaker Tracking by Using a Microphone Array and CASA Processing

Online tracking of speakers is an important task for applications in smart environments such as camera control, meeting annotation and speech separation. Challenges for an audio-only system are small-room reverberation, noise, the unknown number of speakers, and gaps occurring in natural speech. Combining models from neurobiology and cognitive psychology with many-channel signal processing and pattern recognition techniques, a hybrid method was developed. By employing online CASA processing to signals from a microphone array, the real-time capable method is able to track an arbitrary number of concurrent moving speakers in highly reverberant environments.