3D DOA ESTIMATION OF MULTIPLE SOUND SOURCES BASED ON SPATIALLY CONSTRAINED BEAMFORMING DRIVEN BY INTENSITY VECTORS

Sound source localization in three dimensions with micro- phone arrays is an active field of research, applicable in sound enhancement, source separation, sound field analysis and teleconferencing systems. In this contribution we pro- pose a method for three dimensional, multiple sound source localization in reverberant environments employing a spa- tially constrained steered response beamformer on the DOA estimates of the intensity vector. The method enhances signif- icantly previously proposed work by the authors which was relying solely on intensity vector estimates. Experiments are performed in both simulated and real acoustical environments with a spherical microphone array, for multiple sound sources under different reverberation and signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) conditions. The performance of the proposed method is com- pared with our previously proposed work and a subspace method in the spherical harmonic domain which utilizes the direct-path dominance test. The results demonstrate a signifi- cant improvement in terms of localization accuracy.