Localization of multiple acoustic sources with small arrays using a coherence test

Direction finding of more sources than sensors is appealing in situations with small sensor arrays. Potential applications include surveillance, teleconferencing, and auditory scene analysis for hearing aids. A new technique for time-frequency-sparse sources, such as speech and vehicle sounds, uses a coherence test to identify low-rank time-frequency bins. These low-rank bins are processed in one of two ways: (1) narrowband spatial spectrum estimation at each bin followed by summation of directional spectra across time and frequency or (2) clustering low-rank covariance matrices, averaging covariance matrices within clusters, and narrowband spatial spectrum estimation of each cluster. Experimental results with omnidirectional microphones and colocated directional microphones demonstrate the algorithm's ability to localize 3-5 simultaneous speech sources over 4 s with 2-3 microphones to less than 1 degree of error, and the ability to localize simultaneously two moving military vehicles and small arms gunfire. (C) 2008 Acoustical Society of America.