Tracking of Moving Sources in a Reverberant Environment Using Evolutionary Algorithms

This paper describes a source tracking technique in a reverberant environment using a new combination of an adaptive species-based particle swarm optimization (ASPSO) algorithm and a multiple signal classification (MUSIC) algorithm. To mitigate the effects of reverberation, an insightful dereverberation method based on an online autoregressive (AR) array and a minimum variance distortionless response (MVDR) beamformer is developed to dereverberate the microphone signal prior to direction of arrival (DOA) estimation using MUSIC. On the basis of several evolutionary schemes, ASPSO enables rapid tracking by finding local maxima in the MUSIC pseudospectrum. In the ASPSO algorithm, particles are divided into different species, where each species is associated with a sound source. As the sound source moves, the DOA information is dynamically updated using ASPSO, in which the inertia weight decreases progressively to prevent premature convergence. Two update rules for adapting the filter coefficients are employed for drastically moving sources. Simulations and experiments are conducted using a circular microphone array to validate the proposed ASPSO with AR (ASPSO-AR) algorithm. The results demonstrate that ASPSO-AR requires one-third of the processing time of the grid search (GS) method. In addition, the root-mean-square error (RMSE) of the ASPSO-AR algorithm is 10° less than that of the GS method.