Acoustic Source Localization Using Straight Line Approximations

The short paper extends an acoustic signal delay estimation method to general anechoic scenario using image processing techniques. The technique proposed in this paper localizes acoustic speech sources by creating a matrix of phase versus frequency histograms, where the same phases are stacked in appropriate bins. With larger delays and multiple sources coexisting in the same matrix, it becomes cluttered with activated bins. This results in high intensity spots on the spectrogram, making source discrimination difficult. In this paper, we have employed morphological filtering, chain-coding and straight line approximations to ignore noise and enhance the target signal features. Lastly, Hough transform is used for the source localization. The resulting estimates are accurate and invariant to the sampling-rate and shall have application in acoustic source separation.