Study of speaker localization under dynamic and reverberant environments

Abstract

Speaker localization in a reverberant environment is a fundamental problem in audio signal processing. Many solutions have been developed to tackle this problem. However, previous algorithms typically assume a stationary environment in which both the microphone array and the sound sources are not moving. With the emergence of wearable microphone arrays, acoustic scenes have become dynamic with moving sources and arrays. This calls for algorithms that perform well in dynamic environments. In this article, we study the performance of a speaker localization algorithm in such an environment. The study is based on the recently published EasyCom speech dataset recorded in reverberant and noisy environments using a wearable array on glasses. Although the localization algorithm performs well in static environments, its performance degraded substantially when used on the EasyCom dataset. The paper presents performance analysis and proposes methods for improvement.