A robust DOA estimation method for a linear microphone array under reverberant and noisy environments

A robust method for linear array is proposed to address the difficulty of direction-of-arrival (DOA) estimation in reverberant and noisy environments. A direct-path dominance test based on the onset detection is utilized to extract time-frequency bins containing the direct propagation of the speech. The influence of the transient noise, which severely contaminates the onset test, is mitigated by a proper transient noise determination scheme. Then for voice features, a two-stage procedure is designed based on the extracted bins and an effective dereverberation method, with robust but possibly biased estimation from middle frequency bins followed by further refinement in higher frequency bins. The proposed method effectively alleviates the estimation bias caused by the linear arrangement of microphones, and has stable performance under noisy and reverberant environments. Experimental evaluation using a 4-element microphone array demonstrates the efficacy of the proposed method.