Acoustic Microphone Geometry Calibration: An overview and experimental evaluation of state-of-the-art algorithms

Today, we are often surrounded by devices with one or more microphones, such as smartphones, laptops, and wireless microphones. If they are part of an acoustic sensor network, their distribution in the environment can be beneficially exploited for various speech processing tasks. However, applications like speaker localization, speaker tracking, and speech enhancement by beamforming avail themselves of the geometrical configuration of the sensors. Therefore, acoustic microphone geometry calibration has recently become a very active field of research. This article provides an application-oriented, comprehensive survey of existing methods for microphone position self-calibration, which will be categorized by the measurements they use and the scenarios they can calibrate. Selected methods will be evaluated comparatively with real-world recordings.

[1]  Gernot A. Fink,et al.  A hierarchical approach to unsupervised shape calibration of microphone array networks , 2009, 2009 IEEE/SP 15th Workshop on Statistical Signal Processing.

[2]  Reinhold Häb-Umbach,et al.  Coordinate Mapping Between an Acoustic and Visual Sensor Network in the Shape Domain for a Joint Self-Calibrating Speaker Tracking , 2014, ITG Symposium on Speech Communication.

[3]  Marc Pollefeys,et al.  Direct computation of sound and microphone locations from time-difference-of-arrival data , 2008, 2008 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing.

[4]  Reinhold Häb-Umbach,et al.  DOA-based microphone array postion self-calibration using circular statistics , 2013, 2013 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing.

[5]  Gernot A. Fink,et al.  Online multi-speaker tracking using multiple microphone arrays informed by auditory scene analysis , 2013, 21st European Signal Processing Conference (EUSIPCO 2013).

[6]  Nobutaka Ito,et al.  Blind alignment of asynchronously recorded signals for distributed microphone array , 2009, 2009 IEEE Workshop on Applications of Signal Processing to Audio and Acoustics.

[7]  Gernot A. Fink,et al.  Geometry calibration of distributed microphone arrays exploiting audio-visual correspondences , 2014, 2014 22nd European Signal Processing Conference (EUSIPCO).

[8]  Ramani Duraiswami,et al.  Automatic position calibration of multiple microphones , 2004, 2004 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing.

[9]  Stanley T. Birchfield Geometric microphone array calibration by multidimensional scaling , 2003, 2003 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing, 2003. Proceedings. (ICASSP '03)..

[10]  Gernot A. Fink,et al.  Towards acoustic self-localization of ad hoc smartphone arrays , 2011, 2011 Joint Workshop on Hands-free Speech Communication and Microphone Arrays.

[11]  Augusto Sarti,et al.  Geometric calibration of distributed microphone arrays , 2009, 2009 IEEE International Workshop on Multimedia Signal Processing.

[12]  Peter Vary,et al.  An Improved Algorithm for Blind Reverberation Time Estimation , 2010 .

[13]  Alexander Bertrand,et al.  Applications and trends in wireless acoustic sensor networks: A signal processing perspective , 2011, 2011 18th IEEE Symposium on Communications and Vehicular Technology in the Benelux (SCVT).

[14]  Richard Heusdens,et al.  Time-delay estimation for TOA-based localization of multiple sensors , 2014, 2014 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP).

[15]  Matti S. Hämäläinen,et al.  Passive Temporal Offset Estimation of Multichannel Recordings of an Ad-Hoc Microphone Array , 2013, IEEE Transactions on Audio, Speech, and Language Processing.

[16]  Stanley T. Birchfield,et al.  Microphone array position calibration by basis-point classical multidimensional scaling , 2005, IEEE Transactions on Speech and Audio Processing.

[17]  Gernot A. Fink,et al.  Geometry calibration of multiple microphone arrays in highly reverberant environments , 2014, 2014 14th International Workshop on Acoustic Signal Enhancement (IWAENC).

[18]  Alessio Del Bue,et al.  A Bilinear Approach to the Position Self-Calibration of Multiple Sensors , 2012, IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing.

[19]  Volume Assp,et al.  ACOUSTICS. SPEECH. AND SIGNAL PROCESSING , 1983 .

[20]  Sebastian Thrun,et al.  Affine Structure From Sound , 2005, NIPS.

[21]  Israel Cohen,et al.  Distributed Multiple Constraints Generalized Sidelobe Canceler for Fully Connected Wireless Acoustic Sensor Networks , 2013, IEEE Transactions on Audio, Speech, and Language Processing.

[22]  Joshua D. Reiss,et al.  Self-Localization of Ad-Hoc Arrays Using Time Difference of Arrivals , 2016, IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing.

[23]  Emanuel A. P. Habets,et al.  Informed Spatial Filtering for Sound Extraction Using Distributed Microphone Arrays , 2014, IEEE/ACM Transactions on Audio, Speech, and Language Processing.

[24]  Reinhold Häb-Umbach,et al.  A gossiping approach to sampling clock synchronization in wireless acoustic sensor networks , 2014, 2014 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP).

[25]  Michael S. Brandstein,et al.  Microphone Arrays - Signal Processing Techniques and Applications , 2001, Microphone Arrays.

[26]  Augusto Sarti,et al.  Self-calibration of microphone arrays from measurement of Times of Arrival of acoustic signals , 2012, 2012 5th International Symposium on Communications, Control and Signal Processing.

[27]  Ivan Himawan,et al.  Microphone Array Shape Calibration in Diffuse Noise Fields , 2008, IEEE Transactions on Audio, Speech, and Language Processing.

[28]  Gernot A. Fink,et al.  Multi-speaker tracking using multiple distributed microphone arrays , 2014, 2014 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP).

[29]  Harvey F. Silverman,et al.  Microphone position and gain calibration for a large-aperture microphone array , 2005, IEEE Transactions on Speech and Audio Processing.

[30]  Hervé Bourlard,et al.  Ad hoc microphone array calibration: Euclidean distance matrix completion algorithm and theoretical guarantees , 2014, Signal Process..

[31]  Alessio Del Bue,et al.  A closed form solution to the microphone position self-calibration problem , 2012, 2012 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP).

[32]  Reinhold Häb-Umbach,et al.  Unsupervised Geometry Calibration of Acoustic Sensor Networks Using Source Correspondences , 2011, INTERSPEECH.

[33]  Lars Koop,et al.  Procedure for the Accurate Phase Calibration of a Microphone Array , 2009 .

[34]  Samy Bengio,et al.  Automatic analysis of multimodal group actions in meetings , 2005, IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence.

[35]  Javier Macías Guarasa,et al.  Novel GCC-PHAT model in diffuse sound field for microphone array pairwise distance based calibration , 2015, 2015 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP).

[36]  Gernot A. Fink,et al.  A Bag-of-Features approach to acoustic event detection , 2014, 2014 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP).

[37]  Robert C. Bolles,et al.  Random sample consensus: a paradigm for model fitting with applications to image analysis and automated cartography , 1981, CACM.

[38]  Martin Vetterli,et al.  Euclidean Distance Matrices: Essential theory, algorithms, and applications , 2015, IEEE Signal Processing Magazine.

[39]  Hervé Bourlard,et al.  On application of non-negative matrix factorization for ad hoc microphone array calibration from incomplete noisy distances , 2015, 2015 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP).

[40]  Rainer Lienhart,et al.  Position calibration of microphones and loudspeakers in distributed computing platforms , 2005, IEEE Transactions on Speech and Audio Processing.

[41]  S. Tubaro,et al.  Self-calibration of two microphone arrays from volumetric acoustic maps in non-reverberant rooms , 2010, 2010 4th International Symposium on Communications, Control and Signal Processing (ISCCSP).

[42]  Reinhold Häb-Umbach,et al.  Absolute Geometry Calibration of Distributed Microphone Arrays in an Audio-Visual Sensor Network , 2015, ArXiv.

[43]  Matti S. Hämäläinen,et al.  Passive self-localization of microphones using ambient sounds , 2012, 2012 Proceedings of the 20th European Signal Processing Conference (EUSIPCO).

[44]  Reinhold Häb-Umbach,et al.  Microphone Array Position Self-Calibration from Reverberant Speech Input , 2012, IWAENC.

[45]  Richard Heusdens,et al.  Calibration of distributed sound acquisition systems using TOA measurements from a moving acoustic source , 2014, 2014 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP).

[46]  Matti S. Hämäläinen,et al.  Self-localization of wireless acoustic sensors in meeting rooms , 2014, 2014 4th Joint Workshop on Hands-free Speech Communication and Microphone Arrays (HSCMA).

[47]  Augusto Sarti,et al.  Geometric calibration of distributed microphone arrays from acoustic source correspondences , 2010, 2010 IEEE International Workshop on Multimedia Signal Processing.