Direction of Arrival Estimation with Microphone Arrays Using SRP-PHAT and Neural Networks

The Steered Response Power with phase transform (SRP-PHAT) is one of the most employed techniques for Direction of Arrival (DOA) estimation with microphone arrays due its robustness against acoustical conditions as reverberation or noise. Among its main drawbacks is the growth of its computational complexity when the search space increases. To solve this issue, we propose the use of Neural Networks (NN) to obtain the DOA as a regression problem from a low resolution SRP-PHAT power map. The NNs can learn and exploit the information of the acoustic reflections of the room where the array is located with a training method that can be easily performed by an end user without technical knowledge.