Localization of acoustic sources based on the Teager-Kaiser Energy Operator

Abstract

This paper presents a new approach of microphone array sampling and processing for acoustic source localization. By sampling circular arrays in a round robin fashion, nonlinear modulations are purposefully induced by means of the Doppler effect. The discrete time Teager-Kaiser Energy Operator is then used to analyze these modulations. It enables a batch-based localization of multiple sound sources at low complexity. The proposal system uses a small circular array but is suitable for other array geometries as well. In contrast to cross-correlation based localization techniques, we process only two signals while we maintain a circular symmetric system with no preferred look direction. Experiments are reported for up to 5 simultaneously active speech sources.