Multi-source TDOA estimation in reverberant audio using angular spectra and clustering

We consider the problem of estimating the time differences of arrival (TDOAs) of multiple sources from a two-channel reverberant audio signal. While several clustering-based or angular spectrum-based methods have been proposed in the literature, only relatively small-scale experimental evaluations restricted to either category of methods have been carried out so far. We design and conduct the first large-scale experimental evaluation of these methods and investigate a two-step procedure combining angular spectra and clustering. In addition, we introduce and evaluate five new TDOA estimation methods inspired from signal-to-noise-ratio (SNR) weighting and probabilistic multi-source modeling techniques that have been successful for anechoic TDOA estimation and audio source separation. For 5cm microphone spacing, the best TDOA estimation performance is achieved by one of the proposed SNR-based angular spectrum methods. For larger spacing, a variant of the generalized cross-correlation with phase transform (GCC-PHAT) method performs best.

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