Development of compact microphone array for direction-of-arrival estimation

Direction-of-arrival estimates are required in many applications such as automatic video camera steering and multiparty teleconferencing for beam forming and steering to suppress noise and reverberation and improve speech intelligibility. Ambient noise and multiple reflections of the acoustic source signal significantly degrade the performance of time-difference-of-arrival (TDOA) methods to localize the sound source using only two microphones. In this work, we investigate the performance of a multichannel cross-correlation coefficient (MCCC) algorithm for the estimation of the direction-of-arrival (DOA) of an acoustic source in the presence of significant levels of both noise and reverberation. Simulations and initial experimental results confirm that the DOA estimation robustness and complexity is suitable for a practical micro-phone array using miniature MEMS microphones and an FPGA implementation of the MCCC algorithm. � 2013 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht(Outside the USA).