Patent ID: 7305095

Claim:
A computer-readable medium having computer-executable instructions for estimating the location of a person speaking using signals output by a microphone array having a plurality of synchronized audio sensor pairs, said computer-executable instructions comprising: simultaneously sampling the signals to produce a sequence of consecutive blocks of the signal data from each signal, wherein each block of signal data is captured over a prescribed period of time and is at least substantially contemporaneous with blocks of the other signals sampled at the same time; for each group of contemporaneous blocks of signal data, determining whether a block contains human speech data for each block of signal data, filtering out noise attributable to stationary sources in each of the blocks determined to contain human speech data, estimating the location of the person speaking using a time-delay-of-arrival (TDOA) based sound source localization (SSL) technique on those contemporaneous blocks of signal data determined to contain human speech data for each pair of synchronized audio sensors, and computing a consensus estimated location for the person speaking from the individual location estimates determined from the contemporaneous blocks of filtered signal data found to contain human speech data of each pair of synchronized audio sensors; computing a final consensus location of the person speaking using a temporal filtering technique to combine the individual consensus locations computed over a prescribed number of sampling periods; and designating the final consensus location as the location of the person speaking.