A Source Counting Method Using Acoustic Vector Sensor Based on Sparse Modeling of DOA Histogram

The number of sources present in a mixture is crucial information often assumed to be known or detected by source counting. The existing methods for source counting in underdetermined blind speech separation suffer from the overlapping between sources with low W-disjoint orthogonality. To address this issue, we propose to fit the direction-of-arrival (DOA) histogram with multiple von-Mises density (VM) functions directly and form a sparse recovery problem, where all the source clusters and the sidelobes in the DOA histogram are fitted with VM functions of different spatial parameters. We also developed a formula to perform the source counting taking advantage of the values of the sparse source vector to reduce the influence of sidelobes. Experiments are carried out to evaluate the proposed source counting method, and the results show that the proposed method outperforms two well-known baseline methods.