TY - JOUR
T1 - Speaker distance detection using a single microphone
AU - Georganti, Eleftheria
AU - May, Tobias
AU - Van De Par, Steven
AU - Härmä, Aki
AU - Mourjopoulos, John
N1 - Funding Information:
Manuscript received December 16, 2009; revised June 19, 2010; accepted December 22, 2010. Date of publication January 10, 2011; date of current version July 15, 2011. This work was supported by Hellenic Funds and by the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF) under the Hellenic National Stategic Reference Framework (ESPA) 2007-2013, according to Contract MICRO2-38. The associate editor coordinating the review of this manuscript and approving it for publication was Prof. Brian Mak.
PY - 2011
Y1 - 2011
N2 - A method to detect the distance of a speaker from a single microphone in a room environment is proposed. Several features, related to statistical parameters of speech source excitation signals, are introduced and are shown to depend on the distance between source and receiver. Those features are used to train a pattern recognizer for distance detection. The method is tested using a database of speech recordings in four rooms with different acoustical properties. Performance is shown to be independent of the signal gain and level, but depends on the reverberation time and the characteristics of the room. Overall, the system performs well especially for close distances and for rooms with low reverberation time and it appears to be robust to small distance mismatches. Finally, a listening test is conducted in order to compare the results of the proposed method to the performance of human listeners.
AB - A method to detect the distance of a speaker from a single microphone in a room environment is proposed. Several features, related to statistical parameters of speech source excitation signals, are introduced and are shown to depend on the distance between source and receiver. Those features are used to train a pattern recognizer for distance detection. The method is tested using a database of speech recordings in four rooms with different acoustical properties. Performance is shown to be independent of the signal gain and level, but depends on the reverberation time and the characteristics of the room. Overall, the system performs well especially for close distances and for rooms with low reverberation time and it appears to be robust to small distance mismatches. Finally, a listening test is conducted in order to compare the results of the proposed method to the performance of human listeners.
KW - Acoustic signal processing
KW - distance measurement
KW - room acoustics
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=79960503985&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1109/TASL.2011.2104953
DO - 10.1109/TASL.2011.2104953
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:79960503985
SN - 1558-7916
VL - 19
SP - 1949
EP - 1961
JO - IEEE Transactions on Audio, Speech and Language Processing
JF - IEEE Transactions on Audio, Speech and Language Processing
IS - 7
M1 - 5682396
ER -