Echo-enabled Direction-of-Arrival and range estimation of a mobile source in Ambisonic domain

Abstract

Range estimation of a far field sound source in a reverberant environment is known to be a notoriously difficult problem, hence most localization methods are only capable of estimating the source's Direction-of-Arrival (DoA). In an earlier work, we have demonstrated that, under certain restrictive acoustic conditions and given the orientation of a reflecting surface, one can exploit the dominant acoustic reflection to evaluate the DoA \emph{and} the distance to a static sound source in Ambisonic domain. In this article, we leverage the recently presented Generalized Time-domain Velocity Vector (GTVV) representation to estimate these quantities for a moving sound source without an a priori knowledge of reflectors' orientations. We show that the trajectories of a moving source and the corresponding reflections are spatially and temporally related, which can be used to infer the absolute delay of the propagating source signal and, therefore, approximate the microphone-to-source distance. Experiments on real sound data confirm the validity of the proposed approach.