Acoustic source localization in the spherical harmonics domain exploiting low-rank approximations

Abstract: Acoustic signal processing in the spherical harmonics domain (SHD) is an active research area that exploits the signals acquired by higher order microphone arrays. A very important task is that concerning the localization of active sound sources. In this paper, we propose a simple yet effective method to localize prominent acoustic sources in adverse acoustic scenarios. By using a proper normalization and arrangement of the estimated spherical harmonic coefficients, we exploit low-rank approximations to estimate the far field modal directional pattern of the dominant source at each time-frame. The experiments confirm the validity of the proposed approach, with superior performance compared to other recent SHD-based approaches.