Real time Artificial Auditory Systems for cluttered environments

In this paper, a three dimensional sound steering system which exploits pointing error minimization techniques is presented. The system uses a three-microphones array located on the vertexes of an equilateral triangle, which capture audio signals generated from a sound source to control a stepper motor based steering unit. The system works in reverberant and noisy environments, and is able to estimate the Direction Of Arrival (DOA) of an audio source located in a semispace delimited by the plane of the array. The DOA of the audio source is estimated in a two-step process: the first step determines the Time Delay Of Arrival (TDOA) for each pair of microphones, the second step uses the TDOAs previously estimated to compute the DOA. The system works in real time and can achieve state-of-the-art performances using only three microphones, representing a significant improvement with respect to the existing approaches.