Relevant Deconvolution For Acoustic Source Estimation

We describe a robust deconvolution algorithm for simultaneously estimating an acoustic source signal and convolutive filters associated with the acoustic room impulse responses from a pair of microphone signals. In contrast to conventional blind deconvolution techniques which rely upon a knowledge of the statistics of the source signal, our algorithm exploits the nonnegativity and sparsity structure of room impulse responses. The algorithm is formulated as a quadratic optimization problem with respect to both the source signal and filter coefficients, and proceeds by iteratively solving the optimization in two alternating steps. In the H-step, the nonnegative filter coefficients are optimally estimated within a Bayesian framework using a relevant set of regularization parameters. In the S-step, the source signal is estimated without any prior assumption on its statistical distribution. The resulting estimates converge to a relevant solution exhibiting appropriate sparseness in the filters. Simulation results indicate that the algorithm is able to precisely recover both the source signal and filter coefficients, even in the presence of large ambient noise

Inferring Room Geometries

Determining the geometry of an acoustic enclosure using microphone arrays has become an active area of research. Knowledge gained about the acoustic environment, such as the location of reflectors, can be advantageous for applications such as sound source localization, dereverberation and adaptive echo cancellation by assisting in tracking environment changes and helping the initialization of such algorithms. A methodology to blindly infer the geometry of an acoustic enclosure by estimating the location of reflective surfaces based on acoustic measurements using an arbitrary array geometry is developed and analyzed. The starting point of this work considers a geometric constraint, valid both in two and three-dimensions, that converts time-of-arrival and time-difference-pf-arrival information into elliptical constraints about the location of reflectors. Multiple constraints are combined to yield the line or plane parameters of the reflectors by minimizing a specific cost function in the least-squares sense. An iterative constrained least-squares estimator, along with a closed-form estimator, that performs optimally in a noise-free scenario, solve the associated common tangent estimation problem that arises from the geometric constraint. Additionally, a Hough transform based data fusion and estimation technique, that considers acquisitions from multiple source positions, refines the reflector localization even in adverse conditions. An extension to the geometric inference framework, that includes the estimation of the actual speed of sound to improve the accuracy under temperature variations, is presented that also reduces the required prior information needed such that only relative microphone positions in the array are required for the localization of acoustic reflectors. Simulated and real-world experiments demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed method.Open Acces