Joint Estimation of DOA and Distance in Noisy Reverberant Conditions

Sound Source localization (SSL) using microphone arrays is an active research topic with many applications, but noise and reverberation make the direction-of-arrival (DOA) and distance estimation a challenging problem. In this work, we propose a novel method to jointly estimate the DOA and distance in noisy and reverberant environments. Our method exploits the linear phase structure across frequencies in a steering vector (SV). We convert the joint estimation issue into an optimization problem, which can be solved by Newton’s method augmented by a gradient ascent method. Our method does not depend on certain microphone array geometry, and it can also be extended to estimate the elevation angle. We conducted experimental evaluations in simulated noisy and reverberant acoustic conditions, which verified the superiority of our proposed method to several established methods in estimation accuracy and computation efficiency.