Prefiltering techniques on consistent peak selection for talker position estimation in reverberant rooms

Hands-free communication systems need to isolate a single talker contribution in a distant talking situation and in the presence of environmental noises or other acoustic events. Sound source localization is an essential part of this process. However, localization methods that are actually based on time delay estimation (TDE) yield worse performances as reverberation time increases. As the majority of the technologies adopting hands-free systems are applied into bounded environment, a strategy to limit the effect of reverberation is due. The Optimal Line Selection algorithm demonstrated to perform well in case of localization in different reverberant conditions. In this paper the behavior of this estimator will be examined in case of cepstral prefiltering. ©2008 IEEE.