Patent ID: 9560441
Date: 2017-01-31
CPC Classifications: G01S,G10L,H04R

Claim:
1. A computer-implemented method for estimating a direction of arrival of detected speech using a spherical microphone array, the computer-implemented method comprising: determining, at a first time, a first noise covariance matrix comprising a plurality of first values, wherein each of the first values describes a covariance between a pair of microphones detecting diffuse noise, wherein the microphones are part of a spherical microphone array; detecting, at a second time after the first time, audio using the spherical microphone array; determining a signal from the audio using the spherical microphone array, wherein the signal comprises a speech component and a noise component and the signal has a signal intensity calculated from pressure detected by the spherical microphone array; estimating, based on the signal intensity, an estimated noise intensity of the noise component; multiplying the estimated noise intensity by the plurality of first values to obtain a plurality of second values, wherein a second noise covariance matrix includes the plurality of second values; and estimating a direction of arrival of the speech component relative to the spherical microphone array using an extended Kalman filter and the second noise covariance matrix.