In real environments, the presence of ambient noise and room reverberations seriously degrades the accuracy in sound source localization. In addition, conventional sound source localization methods cannot localize multiple sound sources accurately in real noisy environments. This paper proposes a new method of multiple sound source localization using a distributed microphone system that is a recording system with multiple microphones dispersed to a wide area. The proposed method localizes a sound source by finding the position that maximizes the accumulated correlation coefficient between multiple channel pairs. After the estimation of the first sound source, a typical pattern of the accumulated correlation for a single sound source is subtracted from the observed distribution of the accumulated correlation. Subsequently, the second sound source is searched again. To evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed method, experiments of two sound source localization were carried out in an office room. The result shows that sound source localization accuracy is about 99.7%. The proposed method could realize the multiple sound source localization robustly and stably.

This paper describes a method for separating a target sound from other noise arriving in a single direction when the target cannot, therefore, be separated by directivity control. Microphones are arranged in a line toward the sources to form null sensitivity points at given distances from the microphones. The null points exclude non-target sound sources on the basis of weighting coefficients for microphone outputs determined by blind source separation. The separation problem is thereby simplified to instantaneous separation by adjustment of the time-delays for microphone outputs. The system uses a direct (i.e. non-iterative) algorithm for blind separation based on second-order statistics, assuming that all sources are non-stationary signals. Simulations show that the 2-microphone system can separate a target sound with separability of more than 40 dB for the 2-source problem, and 25 dB for the 3-source problem when the other sources are adjacent.

The measurement of the 3-dimensional behavior of early reflections in a sound field has been an important issue in auditorium acoustics since the reflection profile has been found to be strongly correlated with the subjective responsiveness of a listener. In order to detect the incidence angle and relative amplitude of reflections, a 4-point microphone system has conventionally been used. A new measurement system is proposed in this paper, which has 5 microphones. Microphones are located on each four apex of a tetrahedron and at the center of gravity. Early reflections, including simultaneously incident reflections,which previous 4-point microphone system could not discriminate as individual wavefronts, were successfully found with the new system. In order to calculate accurate image source positions, it is necessary to determine the exact peak positions from measured impulse responses composed of highly deformed and overlapped impulse trains. For this purpose, a peak-detecting algorithm, which finds dominant peaks in the impulse response by an iteration method, is introduced. In this paper, the theoretical background and features of the 5-microphone system are described. Also, some results of experiments using this system are described.