Direction-of-arrival estimation of passive acoustic sources in reverberant environments based on the Householder transformation

This paper presents an approach to the direction-of-arrival (DOA) estimation problem in acoustic environments using microphone arrays. It works in the short-time Fourier transform (STFT) domain. It first transforms the noisy speech signals received at the array into the STFT domain. A Householder transformation is then constructed and applied to the multichannel STFT coefficients in each subband. This transformation converts the multichannel STFT coefficients into two components: one is a single coefficient that is dominated by the signal of interest and the other consists of the M - 1 coefficient that is dominated by noise (or even consists of noise-only if there is no reverberation), where M is the number of sensors. A cost function is then formed from the outputs of the Householder transformation and the DOA information can subsequently be obtained by searching the extremum value of this cost function in the angle range between 0° and 180°. Simulation results are provided to illustrate the performance of this approach.