Maximum Likelihood Estimation of the Direction of Sound in a Reverberant Noisy Environment

We describe a new method for estimating the direction of sound in a reverberant environment from basic principles of sound propagation. The method utilizes SNR-adaptive features from time-delay and energy of the directional components after acoustic wave decomposition of the observed sound field to estimate the line-of-sight direction under noisy and reverberant conditions. The effectiveness of the approach is established with measured data of different microphone array configurations under various usage scenarios.