Speaker Tracking for Teleconferencing via Binaural Headset Microphones

Conference: IWAENC 2012 - International Workshop on Acoustic Signal Enhancement
09/04/2012 - 09/06/2012 at Aachen, Germany

Proceedings: IWAENC 2012

Pages: 4Language: englishTyp: PDF

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Authors:
Gamper, Hannes; Tervo, Sakari; Lokki, Tapio (Department of Media Technology Aalto University School of Science, Espoo, Finland)

Abstract:
Speaker tracking for teleconferencing via user-worn binaural headset microphones in combination with a reference microphone array is proposed. The tracking is implemented with particle filtering based on maximum likelihood estimation of time-difference of arrival (TDOA) estimates. An importance function for prior weighting of the particles of silent conferees (i.e., “listeners”) is proposed. Experimental results from tracking three conferees in a meeting scenario are presented. The use of user-worn microphones in addition to a reference microphone array is shown to improve speaker distance estimation and overall tracking performance substantially. The importance function improved the tracking RMSE by 58% on average. The position tracking RMSE of the proposed method is about 0.11 m. Index Terms— Speaker tracking, acoustic source tracking, teleconferencing, binaural headset microphones