Scalable-Complexity Steered Response Power Based on Low-Rank and Sparse Interpolation

The steered response power (SRP) is a popular approach to compute a map of the acoustic scene, typically used for acoustic source localization. The SRP map is obtained as the frequency-weighted output power of a beamformer steered towards a grid of candidate locations. Due to the exhaustive search over a fine grid at all frequency bins, conventional frequency domain-based SRP (conv. FD-SRP) results in a high computational complexity. Time domain-based SRP (conv. TD-SRP) implementations reduce computational complexity at the cost of accuracy using the inverse fast Fourier transform (iFFT). In this paper, to enable a more favourable complexity-performance trade-off as compared to conv. FD-SRP and conv. TD-SRP, we consider the problem of constructing a fine SRP map over the entire search space at scalable computational cost. We propose two approaches to this problem. Expressing the conv. FD-SRP map as a matrix transform of frequency-domain GCCs, we decompose the SRP matrix into a sampling matrix and an interpolation matrix. While sampling can be implemented by the iFFT, we propose to use optimal low-rank or sparse approximations of the interpolation matrix for complexity reduction. The proposed approaches, refered to as sampling + low-rank interpolation-based SRP (SLRI-SRP) and sampling + sparse interpolation-based SRP (SSPI-SRP), are evaluated in various localization scenarios with speech as source signals and compared to the state-of-the-art. The results indicate that SSPI-SRP performs better if large array apertures are used, while SLRI-SRP performs better at small array apertures or a large number of microphones. In comparison to conv. FD-SRP, two to three orders of magnitude of complexity reduction can achieved, often times enabling a more favourable complexity-performance trade-off as compared to conv. TD-SRP. A MATLAB implementation is available online.