학술논문

Exploiting Temporal Context in CNN Based Multisource DOA Estimation
Document Type
Periodical
Source
IEEE/ACM Transactions on Audio, Speech, and Language Processing IEEE/ACM Trans. Audio Speech Lang. Process. Audio, Speech, and Language Processing, IEEE/ACM Transactions on. 29:1594-1608 2021
Subject
Signal Processing and Analysis
Computing and Processing
Communication, Networking and Broadcast Technologies
General Topics for Engineers
Direction-of-arrival estimation
Estimation
Training
Feature extraction
Training data
Time-frequency analysis
Microphone arrays
Convolutional neural networks
direction-of-arrival
temporal context
training data generation
Language
ISSN
2329-9290
2329-9304
Abstract
Supervised learning methods are a powerful tool for direction of arrival (DOA) estimation because they can cope with adverse conditions where simplified models fail. In this work, we consider a previously proposed convolutional neural network (CNN) approach that estimates the DOAs for multiple sources from the phase spectra of the microphones. For speech, specifically, the approach was shown to work well even when trained entirely on synthetically generated data. However, as each frame is processed separately, temporal context cannot be taken into account. This prevents the exploitation of interframe signal correlations, and the fact that DOAs do not change arbitrarily over time. We therefore consider two different extensions of the CNN: the integration of a long short-term memory (LSTM) layer, or of a temporal convolutional network (TCN). In order to accommodate the incorporation of temporal context, the training data generation framework needs to be adjusted. To obtain an easily parameterizable model, we propose to employ Markov chains to realize a gradual evolution of the source activity at different times, frequencies, and directions, throughout a training sequence. A thorough evaluation demonstrates that the proposed configuration for generating training data is suitable for the tasks of single-, and multi-talker localization. In particular, we note that with temporal context, it is important to use speech, or realistic signals in general, for the sources. Experiments with recorded impulse responses and noise reveal that the CNN with the LSTM extension outperforms all other considered approaches, including the plain CNN, and the TCN extension.