Improvement of speaker localization by considering multipath interference of sound wave for binaural robot audition

This paper presents an improved speaker localization method based on the generalized cross-correlation (GCC) method weighted by the phase transform (PHAT) for binaural robot audition. The problem with the conventional direction-of-arrival (DOA) estimation based on the GCC-PHAT method is a multipath interference whereby a sound wave travels to microphones via the front-head path and the back-head path in binaural robot audition. This paper describes a new time delay factor for the GCC-PHAT method to compensate multipath interference on the assumption of spherical robot head. In addition, the restriction of the time difference of arrival (TDOA) estimation by the sampling frequency is also solved by applying the maximum likelihood (ML) estimation in frequency domain. Experiments conducted in the SIG-2 humanoid robot show that the proposed method reduces localization errors by 17.8 degrees on average and by over 35 degrees in side directions comparing to the conventional DOA estimation.