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1999 Technical Reports

Active Stereo Sound Localization

Greg L. Reid and Evangelos Milios

Technical Report CS-1999-09

York University

December 15, 1999

Abstract

Estimating the direction of arrival of sound in three dimensional space is typically performed by generalized time-delay processing on a set of signals from an array of omnidirectional microphones. This requires specialized multichannel A/D hardware, and careful arrangement of the microphones into an array. This work is motivated by the desire to instead only use standard two-channel audio A/D hardware and portable equipment. To estimate direction of arrival of persistent sound, the pose of the microphones is made variable by mounting them on one or more computer-controlled pan-and-tilt units. In this report, we describe the signal processing and control algorithm of a device with two omnidirectional microphones on a fixed baseline and two rotational degrees of freedom. Experimental results with real data are reported with both impulsive and speech sounds in an untreated, normally reverberant indoor environment. We further discuss two more approaches, one using a directional microphone with two rotational degrees of freedom and another using a combination of a directional and an omnidirectional microphone.

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