Ears of the Robot: Direction of Arrival Estimation Based on Pattern Recognition Using Robot-Mounted Microphones

Naoya MOCHIKI  Tetsuji OGAWA  Tetsunori KOBAYASHI  

Publication
IEICE TRANSACTIONS on Information and Systems   Vol.E91-D   No.5   pp.1522-1530
Publication Date: 2008/05/01
Online ISSN: 1745-1361
DOI: 10.1093/ietisy/e91-d.5.1522
Print ISSN: 0916-8532
Type of Manuscript: PAPER
Category: Speech and Hearing
Keyword: 
robot audition,  direction-of-arrival estimation,  pattern recognition,  multiple signal classification,  crosspower-spectrum phase,  

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Summary: 
We propose a new type of direction-of-arrival estimation method for robot audition that is free from strict head related transfer function estimation. The proposed method is based on statistical pattern recognition that employs a ratio of power spectrum amplitudes occurring for a microphone pair as a feature vector. It does not require any phase information explicitly, which is frequently used in conventional techniques, because the phase information is unreliable for the case in which strong reflections and diffractions occur around the microphones. The feature vectors we adopted can treat these influences naturally. The effectiveness of the proposed method was shown from direction-of-arrival estimation tests for 19 kinds of directions: 92.4% of errors were reduced compared with the conventional phase-based method.