Noise-Robust Speech Source Localization and Tracking Using Microphone Arrays for Smartphone-Assisted Hearing Aid Devices

Abstract

Speech Source Localization (SSL) (or Direction of Arrival estimation) is a powerful pre-processing tool that helps identify the direction of the talker of interest in a noisy environment using multiple fixed microphones (known as a Microphone Array). This information is very helpful to the speech-processing pipeline and can be utilized to improve the performance of the overall system. With recent advancements, smartphones now possess the requisite hardware and computational power to perform real-time SSL for different applications. In this work, we propose application-specific SSL algorithms for three types of microphone arrays and show their effectiveness for smartphone implementation under realistic background noise conditions. We evaluate our proposed approaches in several realistic noisy conditions and present object evaluations to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed methods. We also propose the real-time implementation of some of our methods on the latest smartphones and smartphone-assisted devices.