Acoustic source localization based on the generalized cross-correlation and the generalized mean with few microphones.

Microphone arrays are an efficient tool for localizing acoustic sources. Time domain beamforming is one of the techniques which can be used to build a sound source map. This technique based on the cross-correlation of the microphone signals can be seen as a broadband beamforming method. The spatial likelihood functions are averaged with the arithmetic mean. Recently, it has been shown that the harmonic and geometric means can improve the quality of the sound source map. In this study, the influence of the exponent value of the generalized mean on the sound source map is investigated. Then it is shown that the proposed technique is less sensitive to the number of microphones and therefore, it can be reduced.