Sound Localization and Separation for Teleconferencing Systems

Nowadays, a table-top microphone system, which is used for teleconferencing, is usually in- stalled in conferencing rooms. Using such conference phones, all active speakers are recorded simultaneously and a mixture of the speakers is transmitted. For convenience, it would be great to have a device which acquires remotely a high-quality speech signal for every single partici- pant. So this thesis regards an appliance for remote acquisition of speech signals in common office environments. A combination of a microphone array and signal processing has been applied to localize and separate the speech contributions of the participants. Audio based lo- calization is performed through a Steered Response Power Beamformer and smoothed through particle filtering. The separation process is based on Geometric Source Separation which joins the benefits of Beamforming and Blind Source Separation algorithms.