Steered Response Power Method Research Articles

Iterative Volumetric Reduction (IVR) Steered Response Power Method for Acoustic Source Localization

Background: The Steered Response Power–Phase Transform (SRP-PHAT) approach is a breakthrough in the field of source localization in a high reverberant environment, but the substantial computational cost limits its usage in the practical implementation. Objective: This paper presents an efficient SRP-PHAT based, Iterative Volumetric Reduction (IVR) Steered Response Power method for acoustic source localization in non-ideal surroundings. Methods: Developing the coarse acoustic maps in the preliminary iterations provides a measure of the approximate likelihood of a source lying in the corresponding regions. Subsequently, the search space volume is reduced to the region containing points with significant likelihood. Further, these two steps are iterated to achieve the desired resolution. Results and Conclusion: Conclusively, the computational load reduces by 60-80% with considerable upgrading in accuracy as compared to Modified SRP PHAT. The required functional evaluation is adaptable to the environment, which makes it an excellent approach over Iterative modified SRP-PHAT in unfavourable circumstances. Experiments conducted in various scenarios demonstrate the method's significance over the other state–of-the-art methods.

Steered sample algorithm for acoustic source localization.

High-precision source localization depends on many factors, including a suitable location method. Beamforming-based methods, such as the steered response power (SRP), are a common type of acoustic localization methods. However, these methods have low spatial resolution. The SRP method with phase transform (SRP-PHAT) improves the spatial resolution of SRP and is one of the most effective and robust methods for source localization. However, the introduction of a phase transform to SRP might amplify the power of the noise and result in many local extrema in the SRP space, which has a negative impact on source localization. In this paper, a steered sample algorithm (SSA) based on the reciprocity of wave propagation for acoustic source localization is proposed. The SSA localization process is similar to the hyperbolic Radon transform, which is theoretically analyzed and is the most essential difference form the SRP/SRP-PHAT. Compared with the SRP-PHAT, the experimental results demonstrate that the SSA perform better when it comes to array signal positioning with limited array elements and narrow azimuth signal, where SSA can achieve high precision positioning with lower SNR.

Incoherent Frequency Fusion for Broadband Steered Response Power Algorithms in Noisy Environments

The steered response power (SRP) algorithms have been shown to be among the most effective and robust ones in noisy environments for direction of arrival (DOA) estimation. In broadband signal applications, the SRP methods typically perform their computations in the frequency-domain by applying a fast Fourier transform (FFT) on a signal portion, calculating the response power on each frequency bin, and subsequently fusing these estimates to obtain the final result. We introduce a frequency response incoherent fusion method based on a normalized arithmetic mean (NAM). Experiments are presented that rely on the SRP algorithms for the localization of motor vehicles in a noisy outdoor environment, focusing our discussion on performance differences with respect to different signal-to-noise ratios (SNR), and on spatial resolution issues for closely spaced sources. We demonstrate that the proposed fusion method provides higher resolution for the delay-and-sum SRP, and improved performances for minimum variance distortionless response (MVDR) and multiple signal classification (MUSIC).

Accelerated steered response power method for sound source localization via clustering search

The steered response power-phase transform (SRP-PHAT) sound source localization algorithm is robust in a real environment. However, the large computation complexity limits the practical application of SRP-PHAT. For a microphone array, each location corresponds to a set of time differences of arrival (TDOAs), and this paper collects them into a TDOA vector. Since the TDOA vectors in the adjacent regions are similar, we present a fast algorithm based on clustering search to reduce the computation complexity of SRP-PHAT. In the training stage, the K-means or Iterative Self-Organizing Data Analysis Technique (ISODATA) clustering algorithm is used to find the centroid in each cluster with similar TDOA vectors. In the procedure of sound localization, the optimal cluster is found by comparing the steered response powers (SRPs) of all centroids. The SRPs of all candidate locations in the optimal cluster are compared to localize the sound source. Experiments both in simulation environments and real environments have been performed to compare the localization accuracy and computational load of the proposed method with those of the conventional SRP-PHAT algorithm. The results show that the proposed method is able to reduce the computational load drastically and maintains almost the same localization accuracy and robustness as those of the conventional SRP-PHAT algorithm. The difference in localization performance brought by different clustering algorithms used in the training stage is trivial.

Improved steered response power method for sound source localization based on principal eigenvector

Sound source localization is essential in many microphone arrays application, ranging from teleconferencing systems to artificial perception in a reverberant noisy environment. The steered response power (SRP) using the phase transform (SRP-PHAT) source localization algorithm has been proved robust, however, the performance of the SRP-PHAT algorithm degrades in highly reverberant noisy environment. Though the SRP-based maximum likelihood localizers are more robust than SRP-PHAT, they have the drawback of requiring noise variance to be estimated in a silent room. This paper presents an improved SRP-PHAT algorithm based on principal eigenvector. Sound source location is estimated from the principal eigenvector computed from the frequency-domain correlation matrix. Using both simulated and real data, we show that the proposed algorithm achieves higher source localization accuracy compared to the SRP-PHAT algorithm.

Accelerated steered response power method for sound source localization using orthogonal linear array

In microphone arrays application, it is a difficult task to accurately and fast localize sound source in a noisy, reverberant environment. In order to solve this problem, many approaches have been presented. Among them, the steered response power-phase transform weighted (SRP–PHAT) source localization algorithm has been proved robust. However, SRP–PHAT requires high computation cost for searching a large location space. To overcome this shortcoming, an improved SRP–PHAT will be presented that reduces a two-dimension searching space into a couple of one-dimension ones by using an orthogonal linear array. In this method, the parameters of direction of arrival (DOA) are separated. The main computation can be carried out independently in two one-dimension spaces, thus the computational load will be greatly cut down. Simulations show that there is no loss in accuracy in the proposed method.

A Generalized Steered Response Power Method for Computationally Viable Source Localization

The process of locating an acoustic source given measurements of the sound field at multiple microphones is of significant interest as both a classical array signal processing problem, and more recently, as a solution to the problems of automatic camera steering, teleconferencing, hands-free processing, and others. Despite the proven efficacy of steered-beamformer approaches to localization in harsh conditions, their practical application to real-time settings is hindered by undesirably high computational demands. This paper presents a computationally viable implementation of the steered response power (SRP) source localization method. The conventional approach is generalized by introducing an inverse mapping that maps relative delays to sets of candidate locations. Instead of traversing the three-dimensional location space, the one-dimensional relative delay space is traversed; at each lag, all locations which are inverse mapped by that delay are updated. This means that the computation of the SRP map is no longer performed sequentially in space. Most importantly, by subsetting the space of relative delays to only those that achieve a high level of cross-correlation, the required number of algorithm updates is drastically reduced without compromising localization accuracy. The generalization is scalable in the sense that the level of subsetting is an algorithm parameter. It is shown that this generalization may be viewed as a spatial decomposition of the SRP energy map into weighted basis functions-in this context, it becomes evident that the full SRP search considers all basis functions (even the ones with very low weighting). On the other hand, it is shown that by only including a few basis functions per microphone pair, the SRP map is quite accurately represented. As a result, in a real environment, the proposed generalization achieves virtually the same anomaly rate as the full SRP search while only performing 10% the amount of algorithm updates as the full search.