Real-time multiple speaker tracking by multi-modal integration for mobile robots

Abstract

In this paper, real-time multiple speaker tracking is addressed, because it is essential in robot perception and humanrobot social interaction. The difficulty lies in treating a mixture of sounds, occlusion (some talkers are hidden) and real-time processing. Our approach consists of three components; (1) the extraction of the direction of each speaker by using interaural phase difference and interaural intensity difference, (2) the resolution of each speaker's direction by multi-modal integration of audition, vision and motion with canceling inevitable motor noises in motion in case of an unseen or silent speaker, and (3) the distributed implementation to three PCs connected by TCP/IP network to attain real-time processing. As a result, we...