Joint acoustic localization and dereverberation through plane wave decomposition and sparse regularization

Abstract

Acoustic source localization and dereverberation are formulated jointly as an inverse problem. The inverse problem consists of the approximation of the sound field measured by a set of microphones. The recorded sound pressure is matched with that of a particular acoustic model based on a collection of plane waves arriving from different directions at the microphone positions. In order to achieve meaningful results, spatial and spatio-spectral sparsity can be promoted in the weight signals controlling the plane waves. The large-scale optimization problem resulting from the inverse problem formulation is solved using a first order optimization algorithm combined with a weighted overlap-add procedure. It is shown that once the weight signals capable of effectively approximating the sound field are obtained, they can be readily used to localize a moving sound source in terms of direction of arrival (DOA) and to perform dereverberation in a highly reverberant environment. Results from simulation experiments and from real measurements show that the proposed algorithm is robust against both localized and diffuse noise exhibiting a noise reduction in the dereverberated signals.

Audio Samples

Sparsity	Spatio-temporal	Spatio-spectral	Spatial	Spatial
Model	TESM	PWDM	PWDM	TESM	Microphone	Anechoic
\(N_{m} = 4\)
\(N_{m} = 8\)
\(N_{m} =12\)
\(N_{m} =16\)
\(N_{m} =20\)
\(N_{m} =24\)

Acknowledgments

First 5 seconds of track 5 of Bang & Olufsen CD “Music for Archimedes”. All rights of this anechoic sample belong to B&O. The authors would like to thank Søren Bech and B&O for allowing reproduction here.

This research work was carried out at the ESAT Laboratory of KU Leuven, the frame of the FP7-PEOPLE Marie Curie Initial Training Network “Dereverberation and Reverberation of Audio, Music, and Speech (DREAMS)”, funded by the European Commission under Grant Agreement no. 316969, KU Leuven Research Council CoE PFV/10/002 (OPTEC), the Interuniversity Attraction Poles Programme initiated by the Belgian Science Policy Office IUAP P7/19 “Dynamical systems control and optimization” (DYSCO) 2012-2017, KU Leuven Impulsfonds IMP/14/037 and KU Leuven C2-16-00449 “Distributed Digital Signal Processing for Ad-hoc Wireless Local Area Audio Networking”. The scientific responsibility is assumed by its authors.