Multiple Acoustic Source Localization in Microphone Array Networks

The problem of multiple acoustic source localization using observations from a microphone array network is investigated in this article. Multiple source signals are assumed to be window-disjoint-orthogonal (WDO) on the time-frequency (TF) domain and time delay of arrival (TDOA) measurements are extracted at each TF bin. A Bayesian network model is then proposed to jointly assign the measurements to different sources and estimate the acoustic source locations. Considering that the WDO assumption is usually violated under reverberant and noisy environments, we construct a relational network by coding the distance information between the distributed microphone arrays such that adjacent arrays have higher probabilities of observing the same acoustic source, which is able to mitigate the miss detection issues in adverse environments. A Laplace approximate variational inference method is introduced to estimate the hidden variables in the proposed Bayesian network model. Both simulations and real data experiments are performed. The results show that our proposed method is able to achieve better source localization accuracy than existing methods.