Background noise suppression for acoustic localization by means of an adaptive energy detection approach

A microphone array can be employed to localize dominant acoustic sources in a given noisy environment. This capability is successfully used in good signal to noise ratio (SNR) conditions but its accuracy decreases considerably in the presence of other background noise sources. In order to counteract this effect, a novel approach that combines the information provided by a Gaussian energy detector (GED) with the approved localization method SRP-PHAT is presented in this paper. To evaluate the presented technique, several acoustic sources (speech and impulsive sounds) were considered in a variety of different scenarios to demonstrate the robustness and the accuracy of the system proposed.