Reflection Assisted Sound Source Localization Through a Harmonic Domain MUSIC Framework

This work presents a method that persuades acoustic reflections to be a favorable property for sound source localization. Whilst most real world spatial audio applications utilize prior knowledge of sound source position, estimating such positions in reverberant environments is still considered to be a difficult problem due to acoustic reflections. This article presents a novel MUSIC framework for multiple sound source localization (range, elevation, azimuth) in reverberant rooms by incorporating a recently proposed region-to-region room transfer model. The method is built upon the received signals of a higher order microphone and a spherical harmonic representation of the room transfer function. We demonstrate the method's general applicability and multiple source localization performance through a simulation study across an assortment of reverberant conditions. Additionally, we investigate robustness against various system modeling errors to gauge implementation viability. Finally, we prove the method in a practical experiment inside a real-world room with measured region-to-region transfer function parameters.