A method to estimate sound source orientation in a reverberant room using a microphone array is proposed. We extend the conventional modeling of a room transfer function based on the image method in order to take into account the directivity of a sound source. With this extension, a transfer function between a sound source and a listener (or a microphone) is described by the superposition of transfer functions from each image source to the listener multiplied by the source directivity; thus, the sound source orientation can be estimated by analyzing how the image sources are distributed (power distribution of image sources) from observed signals. We applied eigenvalue analysis to the spatial correlation matrix of the microphone array observation to obtain the power distribution of image sources. Bsed on the assumption that the spatial correlation matrix for each set of source position and orientation is known a priori, the variation of the eigenspace can be modeled. By comparing the eigenspace of observed signals and that of pre-learned models, we estimated the sound source orientation. Through experiments using seven microphones, the sound source orientation was estimated with high accuracy by increasing the reverberation time of a room.

In D.O.A. estimation, identification of the signal and the noise subspaces plays an essential role. This identification process was traditionally achieved by the eigenvalue decomposition (EVD) of the spatial correlation matrix of observations or the generalized eigenvalue decomposition (GEVD) of the spatial correlation matrix of observations with respect to that of an observation noise. The framework based on the GEVD is not always an extension of that based on the EVD, since the GEVD is not applicable to the noise-free case which can be resolved by the framework based on the EVD. Moreover, they are not applicable to the case in which the spatial correlation matrix of the noise is singular. Recently, a quotient-singular-value-decomposition-based framework, that can be applied to problems with singular noise correlation matrices, is introduced for noise reduction. However, this framework also can not treat the noise-free case. Thus, we do not have a unified framework of the identification of these subspaces. In this paper, we show that a unified framework of the identification of these subspaces is realized by the concept of proper and improper eigenspaces of the spatial correlation matrix of the noise with respect to that of observations.

A method for recovering the LPC spectrum from a microphone array input signal corrupted by less directional ambient noise is proposed. This method is based on the subspace method, in which directional signal and non-directional noise is classified in the subspace domain using eigenvalue analysis of the spatial correlation matrix. In this paper, the coherent subspace (CSS) method, a broadband extension of the subspace method, is employed. The advantage of this method is that is requires a much smaller number of averages in the time domain for estimating subspace, suitable feature for frame processing such as speech recognition. To enhance the performance of noise reduction, elimination of noise-dominant subspace using projection is further proposed, which is effective when the SNR is low and classification of noise and signals using eigenvalue analysis is difficult.