New Approaches for Two-Dimensional DOA Estimation of Coherent and Noncircular Signals with Acoustic Vector-sensor Array

This thesis is mainly concerned with the two-dimensional direction of arrival (2D-DOA) estimation using acoustic vector-sensor array for coherent signals and noncircular signals. As for coherent signals, the thesis proposes two algorithms, namely, a 2D-DOA estimation algorithm with acoustic vector-sensor array using a single snapshot, and an improved 2D-DOA estimation algorithm of coherent signals. In the first algorithm, only a single snapshot is employed to estimate the 2D-DOA, and the second is an improved algorithm based on the method of Palanisamy et al. Compared to the existing algorithm, the proposed algorithm has the following advantages: (1) lower computational complexity, (2) better estimation performance, and (3) acquiring automatically-paired 2D-DOA estimates. As for noncircular signals, we propose real-valued space PM and ESPRIT algorithms for 2D-DOA estimation using arbitrarily spaced acoustic vector-sensor array. By exploiting the noncircularity of incoming signals to increase the amount of effective data, the proposed algorithms can provide a better 2D-DOA estimation performance with fewer snapshots, which means a relatively lower sample rate can be used in practical implementations. Compared with the traditional PM and ESPRIT, the proposed algorithms provide better estimation performance while having similar computational complexity. Furthermore, the proposed algorithms are suitable for arbitrary arrays and yield paired azimuth and elevation angle estimates without requiring extra computationally expensive pairing operations

Direction of Arrival Estimation in the Spherical Harmonic Domain using Subspace Pseudo-Intensity Vectors

Direction of Arrival (DOA) estimation is a fundamental problem in acoustic signal processing. It is used in a diverse range of applications, including spatial filtering, speech dereverberation, source separation and diarization. Intensity vector-based DOA estimation is attractive, especially for spherical sensor arrays, because it is computationally efficient. Two such methods are presented which operate on a spherical harmonic decomposition of a sound field observed using a spherical microphone array. The first uses Pseudo-Intensity Vectors (PIVs) and works well in acoustic environments where only one sound source is active at any time. The second uses Subspace Pseudo-Intensity Vectors (SSPIVs) and is targeted at environments where multiple simultaneous sources and significant levels of reverberation make the problem more challenging. Analytical models are used to quantify the effects of an interfering source, diffuse noise and sensor noise on PIVs and SSPIVs. The accuracy of DOA estimation using PIVs and SSPIVs is compared against the state-of-the-art in simulations including realistic reverberation and noise for single and multiple, stationary and moving sources. Finally, robust performance of the proposed methods is demonstrated using speech recordings in real acoustic environments

Multiple source direction of arrival estimation using subspace pseudointensity vectors

The recently proposed subspace pseudointensity method for direction of arrival estimation is applied in the context of Tasks 1 and 2 of the LOCATA Challenge using the Eigenmike recordings. Specific implementation details are described and results reported for the development dataset, for which the ground truth source directions are available. For both single and multiple source scenarios, the average absolute error angle is about 9 degrees.Comment: In Proceedings of the LOCATA Challenge Workshop - a satellite event of IWAENC 2018 (arXiv:1811.08482