Publications

Localisation in azimuth and distance of sound sources such as speech is an important ability for both human and artificial listeners. While progress has been made, particularly for azimuth estimation, most work has been directed at the special case of static listeners and static sound sources. Although dynamic sound sources create their own localisation challenges such as motion blur, moving listeners have the potential to exploit additional cues not available in the static situation. An example is motion parallax, based on a sequence of azimuth estimates, which can be used to triangulate sound source location. The current study examines what types of listener (or sensor) motion are beneficial for localisation. Is any kind of motion useful, or do certain motion trajectories deliver robust estimates rapidly? Eight listener motion strategies and a no-motion baseline were tested, including simple approaches such as random walks and motion limited to head rotations only, as well as more sophisticated strategies designed to maximise the amount of new information available at each time step or to minimise the overall estimate uncertainty. Sequential integration of estimates was achieved using a particle filtering framework. Evaluations, performed in a simulated acoustic environment with single sources under both anechoic and reverberant conditions, demonstrated that two strategies were particularly effective for localisation. The first was simply to move towards the most likely source location, which is beneficial in increasing signal-to-noise ratio, particularly in reverberant conditions. The other high performing approach was based on moving in the direction which led to the largest reduction in the uncertainty of the location estimate. Both strategies achieved estimation errors nearly an order of magnitude less than those obtainable with a static approach, demonstrating the power of motion-based cues to sound source localisation.