Speakers counting by proposed nested microphone array in combination with limited space SRP

In this paper, a novel method is presented for estimating the number of speakers based on the microphone arrays. Firstly, a 3D snowflake nested microphone array (SNMA) is proposed for recording the speech signals. In the following, the steered response power (SRP) algorithm is implemented on subbands in limited spaces conditions for all microphone pairs related to the subarrays. Therefore, a weighted averaging method is implemented on subband limited spaces SRPs (LSRP), and the final energy map is compared with the histogram of the maximums of the SRP function on different subbands for various time frames. The passed candidate points are categorized by unsupervised K-means clustering and the number of speakers is estimated by the silhouette criteria. The accuracy of the proposed method is compared with PENS, i-vector PLDA, and wavelet-GEVD algorithms. The results show the superiority of the proposed method in comparison with other previous research.