Real-Time Smartphone Implementation of Noise-Robust Speech Source Localization Algorithm for Hearing Aid Users

Speech source localization has numerous application areas such as hearing aid devices (HAD) and consumer electronics applications. Utilizing the powerful processing hardware of smartphones, we demonstrate that smartphones are capable of instantaneous estimation of sound location. In this paper, we present instantaneous direction of arrival (DOA) by using traditional Generalized Cross Correlation (GCC) followed by a spatial post-filtering stage. A simple voice activity detector (VAD) is used for the post-filtering stage to improve noise robustness in some realistic reverberant noisy environments. Root mean square error (RMSE) is used as an evaluation criterion for the proposed method. Both real recorded data and simulated data under different noise types are used for experiments. A real-time implementation of the method on an Android-based smartphone is also presented.