Bayesian time-domain multiple sound source localization for a stochastic machine

International audienc

Online Localization of Multiple Moving Speakers in Reverberant Environments

International audienceThis paper addresses the problem of online multiple moving speakers localization in reverberant environments. The direct-path relative transfer function (DP-RTF), as defined by the ratio between the first taps of the convolutive transfer function (CTF) of two microphones, encodes the inter-channel direct-path information and is thus used as a localization feature being robust against reverberation. The CTF estimation is based on the cross-relation method. In this work, the recursive least-square method is proposed to solve the cross-relation problem, due to its relatively low computational cost and its good convergence rate. The DP-RTF feature estimated at each time-frequency bin is assumed to correspond to a single speaker. A complex Gaussian mixture model is used to assign each observed feature to one among several speakers. The recursive expectation-maximization algorithm is adopted to update online the model parameters. The method is evaluated with a new dataset containing multiple moving speakers, where the ground-truth speaker trajectories are recorded with a motion capture system

Online Localization and Tracking of Multiple Moving Speakers in Reverberant Environments

We address the problem of online localization and tracking of multiple moving speakers in reverberant environments. The paper has the following contributions. We use the direct-path relative transfer function (DP-RTF), an inter-channel feature that encodes acoustic information robust against reverberation, and we propose an online algorithm well suited for estimating DP-RTFs associated with moving audio sources. Another crucial ingredient of the proposed method is its ability to properly assign DP-RTFs to audio-source directions. Towards this goal, we adopt a maximum-likelihood formulation and we propose to use an exponentiated gradient (EG) to efficiently update source-direction estimates starting from their currently available values. The problem of multiple speaker tracking is computationally intractable because the number of possible associations between observed source directions and physical speakers grows exponentially with time. We adopt a Bayesian framework and we propose a variational approximation of the posterior filtering distribution associated with multiple speaker tracking, as well as an efficient variational expectation-maximization (VEM) solver. The proposed online localization and tracking method is thoroughly evaluated using two datasets that contain recordings performed in real environments.Comment: IEEE Journal of Selected Topics in Signal Processing, 201

Distributed Affine Projection Algorithm Over Acoustically Coupled Sensor Networks

[EN] In this paper, we present a distributed affine projection (AP) algorithm for an acoustic sensor network where the nodes are acoustically coupled. Every acoustic node is composed of a microphone, a processor, and an actuator to control the sound field. This type of networks can use distributed adaptive algorithms to deal with the active noise control (ANC) problem in a cooperative manner, providing more flexible and scalable ANC systems. In this regard, we introduce here a distributed version of the multichannel filtered-x AP algorithm over an acoustic sensor network that it is called distributed filtered-x AP (DFxAP) algorithm. The analysis of the mean and the mean-square deviation performance of the algorithm at each node is given for a network with a ring topology and without constraints in the communication layer. The theoretical results are validated through several simulations. Moreover, simulations show that the proposed DFxAP outperforms the previously reported distributed multiple error filtered-x least mean square algorithm.This work was supported in part by EU together with Spanish Government under Grant TEC2015-67387-C4-1-R (MINECO/FEDER), and in part by Generalitat Valenciana under PROMETEOII/2014/003.Ferrer Contreras, M.; Gonzalez, A.; Diego Antón, MD.; Piñero, G. (2017). Distributed Affine Projection Algorithm Over Acoustically Coupled Sensor Networks. IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing. 65(24):6423-6434. https://doi.org/10.1109/TSP.2017.2742987S64236434652

Suivi Multi-Locuteurs avec des Informations Audio-Visuelles pour la Perception des Robots

Robot perception plays a crucial role in human-robot interaction (HRI). Perception system provides the robot information of the surroundings and enables the robot to give feedbacks. In a conversational scenario, a group of people may chat in front of the robot and move freely. In such situations, robots are expected to understand where are the people, who are speaking, or what are they talking about. This thesis concentrates on answering the first two questions, namely speaker tracking and diarization. We use different modalities of the robot’s perception system to achieve the goal. Like seeing and hearing for a human-being, audio and visual information are the critical cues for a robot in a conversational scenario. The advancement of computer vision and audio processing of the last decade has revolutionized the robot perception abilities. In this thesis, we have the following contributions: we first develop a variational Bayesian framework for tracking multiple objects. The variational Bayesian framework gives closed-form tractable problem solutions, which makes the tracking process efficient. The framework is first applied to visual multiple-person tracking. Birth and death process are built jointly with the framework to deal with the varying number of the people in the scene. Furthermore, we exploit the complementarity of vision and robot motorinformation. On the one hand, the robot’s active motion can be integrated into the visual tracking system to stabilize the tracking. On the other hand, visual information can be used to perform motor servoing. Moreover, audio and visual information are then combined in the variational framework, to estimate the smooth trajectories of speaking people, and to infer the acoustic status of a person- speaking or silent. In addition, we employ the model to acoustic-only speaker localization and tracking. Online dereverberation techniques are first applied then followed by the tracking system. Finally, a variant of the acoustic speaker tracking model based on von-Mises distribution is proposed, which is specifically adapted to directional data. All the proposed methods are validated on datasets according to applications.La perception des robots joue un rôle crucial dans l’interaction homme-robot (HRI). Le système de perception fournit les informations au robot sur l’environnement, ce qui permet au robot de réagir en consequence. Dans un scénario de conversation, un groupe de personnes peut discuter devant le robot et se déplacer librement. Dans de telles situations, les robots sont censés comprendre où sont les gens, ceux qui parlent et de quoi ils parlent. Cette thèse se concentre sur les deux premières questions, à savoir le suivi et la diarisation des locuteurs. Nous utilisons différentes modalités du système de perception du robot pour remplir cet objectif. Comme pour l’humain, l’ouie et la vue sont essentielles pour un robot dans un scénario de conversation. Les progrès de la vision par ordinateur et du traitement audio de la dernière décennie ont révolutionné les capacités de perception des robots. Dans cette thèse, nous développons les contributions suivantes : nous développons d’abord un cadre variationnel bayésien pour suivre plusieurs objets. Le cadre bayésien variationnel fournit des solutions explicites, rendant le processus de suivi très efficace. Cette approche est d’abord appliqué au suivi visuel de plusieurs personnes. Les processus de créations et de destructions sont en adéquation avecle modèle probabiliste proposé pour traiter un nombre variable de personnes. De plus, nous exploitons la complémentarité de la vision et des informations du moteur du robot : d’une part, le mouvement actif du robot peut être intégré au système de suivi visuel pour le stabiliser ; d’autre part, les informations visuelles peuvent être utilisées pour effectuer l’asservissement du moteur. Par la suite, les informations audio et visuelles sont combinées dans le modèle variationnel, pour lisser les trajectoires et déduire le statut acoustique d’une personne : parlant ou silencieux. Pour experimenter un scenario où l’informationvisuelle est absente, nous essayons le modèle pour la localisation et le suivi des locuteurs basé sur l’information acoustique uniquement. Les techniques de déréverbération sont d’abord appliquées, dont le résultat est fourni au système de suivi. Enfin, une variante du modèle de suivi des locuteurs basée sur la distribution de von-Mises est proposée, celle-ci étant plus adaptée aux données directionnelles. Toutes les méthodes proposées sont validées sur des bases de données specifiques à chaque application