Onmidirectional audio-visual talker localization based on dynamic fusion of audio-visual features using validity and reliability criteria

This paper proposes a robust omnidirectional audio-visual (AV) talker localizer for AV applications. The proposed localizer consists of two innovations. One of them is robust omnidirectional audio and visual features. The direction of arrival (DOA) estimation using an equilateral triangular microphone array, and human position estimation using an omnidirectional video camera extract the AV features. The other is a dynamic fusion of the AV features. The validity criterion, called the audio- or visual-localization counter, validates each audio- or visual-feature. The reliability criterion, called the speech arriving evaluator, acts as a dynamic weight to eliminate any prior statistical properties from its fusion procedure. The proposed localizer can compatibly achieve talker localization in a speech activity and user localization in a non-speech activity under the identical fusion rule. Talker localization experiments were conducted in an actual room to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed localizer. The results confirmed that the talker localization performance of the proposed AV localizer using the validity and reliability criteria is superior to that of conventional localizers.