Fast and Robust 3-D Sound Source Localization with DSVD-PHAT

Abstract: This paper introduces a variant of the Singular Value Decomposition with Phase Transform (SVD-PHAT), named Difference SVD-PHAT (DSVD-PHAT), to achieve robust Sound Source Localization (SSL) in noisy conditions. Experiments are performed on a Baxter robot with a four-microphone planar array mounted on its head. Results show that this method offers similar robustness to noise as the state-of-the-art Multiple Signal Classification based on Generalized Singular Value Decomposition (GSVD-MUSIC) method, and considerably reduces the computational load by a factor of 250. This performance gain thus makes DSVD-PHAT appealing for real-time application on robots with limited on-board computing power.