Sound Source Localization Using Relative Harmonic Coefficients in Modal Domain

Abstract

This paper proposes a data-driven source localization approach under a noisy and reverberant environment, using a newly defined feature named relative harmonic coefficients (RHC) in the modal domain. Being independent of the source signal, the RHC is capable of localizing a sound source(s) located at unknown position(s). Two distinctive multi-view Gaussian process (MVGP), (i) multifrequency views and (ii) multi-mode views, are developed for Gaussian process regression (GPR) to reveal the mapping function from the RHC to the corresponding source location. We evaluate the effectiveness of the algorithm for single source localization while the underlying concepts proposed can be extended to acoustic scenarios where multiple sources are active. Experimental results, using a spherical microphone array, confirm that the proposed algorithm has a faster speed and achieves competitive performance in comparison to the state-of-art algorithm.