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.