Towards Wireless Acoustic Sensor Networks for Location Estimation and Counting of Multiple Speakers in Real-Life Conditions

Speaker localization and counting in real-life conditions remains a challenging task. The computational burden, transmission usage and synchronization issues pose several limitations. Moreover, the physical characteristics of real speakers in terms of directivity pattern and orientation, as well as restrictions in the microphone array positioning, which commonly have to be placed close to walls, deteriorate the localization performance. In this paper, we propose a localization and counting method that accounts for the adjacent wall reflections and evaluate it using a dataset of real recorded signals of actual speakers that we collected. Our dataset is publicly available to foster further investigation towards localization in real-life scenarios.