VoiceMap: Autonomous Mapping of Microphone Array for Voice Localization

Abstract

Voice command systems have been widely deployed on many smart devices for remote control. To further enrich the intelligence of these smart devices, the location of sound plays an important role in context-aware acoustic services. Despite initial steps made toward reliable voice localization, the state of the arts rely on prior knowledge of device location, device orientation and an indoor electronic map. To mitigate this additional cost, this paper presents VoiceMap, an autonomous mapping system of acoustic devices for voice localization. The insight behind VoiceMap is to explore the cooperation of sweeping robots and voice devices. Specifically, the sweeping robot is responsible for exploring the electronic map of the environment, while the microphone array is responsible for localizing the sweeping robot, so that we can establish the positional relationship between them. The core challenges are how to accurately locate the continuously moving robot, and how to synchronize the coordinate systems of the sweeping robot and the voice devices. To this end, we first design an inertial-based super-resolution method to estimate the angle of arrival (AoA) with respect to the robot. Then, we develop an effective coordinate synchronization mechanism, so that VoiceMap can automatically locate the voice devices on the electronic map generated by the robot. Finally, we implement a prototype system using commercial devices, and conduct comprehensive experiments to verify the proposed system. The experimental results show that we can realize a median error of 0.12m in terms of device localization.