A Two-Step Approach for Narrowband Source Localization in Reverberant Rooms

Abstract

This paper presents a two-step approach for narrowband source localization within reverberant rooms. In the first step, the sound field is decomposed into direct and reverberant components where the latter is estimated as an equivalent superposition of plane waves using Iteratively Reweighted Least Squares. The second step performs source localization by modeling the dereverberated component as a sparse representation of point-source distribution using Orthogonal Matching Pursuit. The proposed method enhances localization accuracy with fewer measurements, particularly in environments with strong reverberation. A numerical simulation in a reverberant room, using a uniform microphone array surrounding the region of interest, demonstrates real-world feasibility. Notably, the proposed method and microphone placement effectively localize sound sources within the horizontal plane without requiring prior knowledge of boundary conditions and room geometry, making it versatile for application in different room types.