Estimating positions of multiple adjacent speakers based on music spectra correlation using a microphone array

In this paper, we propose an improved method of estimating the positions of two speakers using a microphone array. A well-known method, MUSIC, can be used to estimate speaker positions with high precision. However, in the special case that the speakers are closely located, the conventional MUSIC-based method sometimes fails to identify the existence of certain speakers, because close peaks in the MUSIC spectrum cannot be resolved. To overcome this difficulty, we propose a new method utilizing a cross-correlation between space-spectra calculated by MUSIC. Experimental results in a real environment have shown that the proposed method is effective in resolving the approximate positions of adjacent speakers.