Simultaneous Localization of Multiple Sound Sources using Blind Adaptive MIMO Filtering

Blind adaptive filtering for time delay of arrival (TDOA) estimation is a very powerful method for acoustic source localization in reverberant environments with broadband signals like speech. Based on a recently presented generic framework for blind signal processing for convolutive mixtures, called TRINICON, we present a TDOA estimation method for simultaneous multidimensional localization of multiple sources. Moreover, an interesting link to the known single-input multiple-output (SIMO)-based adaptive eigenvalue decomposition (AED) method is shown. We evaluate the novel multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO)-based approach and compare it with the known SIMO-based method in a reverberant acoustic environment using reference data of the positions obtained from infrared sensors. The results show that the new approach is very robust against reverberation and background noise.