Multichannel DoA Estimation

Advisor: Dalia El Badawy

Description: Recent work has shown that it is possible to estimate the direction of arrival (DoA) of a sound using just one microphone, albeit a special one surrounded by LEGO bricks [1]. The idea is that the LEGO scatters the incident sound providing a special directional signature that we can use to estimate the DoA. This is similar to the functionality of the head-related transfer function (HRTF) in humans and other animals. Since we have two ears not one, for this project we would like to switch to the case of two or more microphones. The goal is to compare various localization algorithms with and without the presence of scattering, first through numerical simulations then time-permitting a real experiment can be done.

Level: MS

Deliverables:

  • Report describing the methods and results.
  • Code to reproduce the results, with documentation.

References:

[1] D. El Badawy and I. Dokmanic, “Direction of Arrival with One Microphone, a few LEGOs, and Non-Negative Matrix Factorization,” IEEE/ACM Transactions on Audio, Speech and Language Processing, 2018.

Prerequisites:

  • Interest in research,
  • Some math wouldn’t hurt,
  • Coding skills for beautiful code.

Type of Work: 50% Research, 50% Coding