Sound source localization for robot auditory systems

Sound source localization (SSL) is a major function of robot auditory systems for intelligent home robots. The steered response power-phase transform (SRP-PHAT) is a widely used method for robust SSL. However, it is too slow to run in real time, since SRP-PHAT searches a large number of candidate sound source locations. This paper proposes a search space clustering method designed to speed up the SRP-PHAT based sound source localization algorithm for intelligent home robots equipped with small scale microphone arrays. The proposed method reduces the number of candidate sound source locations by 30.6% and achieves 46.7% error reduction compared to conventional methods.