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Speaker Direction-of-Arrival Estimation Based on Orthogonal Dipoles

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Abstract

The small aperture microphone array becomes more and more popular in the consumer electronics. However, the small aperture usually limits the performance of the traditional DoA estimation methods. The differential microphone array (DMA) has attracted much attention, recently. The DMA has the frequency-independent beampatterns owing to the small size and the dipole is one of the basic types. In this paper, we investigate the relationship between the direction-of-arrival (DoA) and the dipole beampatterns. It shows that the DoA can be directly yielded by an orthogonal dipole pair for the small aperture microphone array. Based on this relationship, we propose a speaker DoA estimation method with orthogonal dipoles (OD). The OD exhibits a good performance to DoA estimation. Nevertheless, it is vulnerable to the axial directions in the reverberant environment. To increase the robustness to the axial directions, we introduce the anti-reverberation function in OD and propose the improved OD method. Both simulations and experiments show that the proposed methods not only significantly outperform the traditional methods but also are much more computationally efficient without the spatial spectrum search.

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Acknowledgements

This paper is sponsored by Natural Science Foundation of Shanghai, Fund No. 14ZR1447200. The authors would like to thank the associate editor and anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments and suggestions to improve this paper. Furthermore, as the first author, I would like to thank my wife Doctor Chen Wang. The more I know about you, the more deeply I fall in love with you. Without a splendid diamond or even a grand wedding, you married me. Thanks for being with me and supporting me. Love you forever.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Shanghai Institute of Microsystem and Information Technology, CAS, Shanghai, China

    Feng Guo, Xing You & Baoqing Li

  2. University of Chinese Academy of Sciences (UCAS), Beijing, China

    Feng Guo, Zhaoqiong Huang, Xing You & Baoqing Li

  3. Beijing Unisound Information Technology Co Ltd., Beijing, China

    Yuhang Cao, Haixing Guan & Jiaen Liang

  4. Institute of Acoustics, CAS, Beijing, China

    Zhaoqiong Huang

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  1. Feng Guo
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Correspondence to Feng Guo.

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Guo, F., Cao, Y., Huang, Z. et al. Speaker Direction-of-Arrival Estimation Based on Orthogonal Dipoles. Circuits Syst Signal Process 38, 2320–2334 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00034-018-0976-4

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