Asynchronous Microphone Array Calibration using Hybrid TDOA Information

Chengjie Zhang; Jiang Wang; He Kong

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arXiv · 2403.05791

Asynchronous Microphone Array Calibration using Hybrid TDOA Information

Chengjie Zhang·Jiang Wang·He Kong

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Abstract

Asynchronous microphone array calibration is a prerequisite for many audition robot applications. A popular solution to the above calibration problem is the batch form of Simultaneous Localisation and Mapping (SLAM), using the time difference of arrival measurements between two microphones (TDOA-M), and the robot (which serves as a moving sound source during calibration) odometry information. In this paper, we introduce a new form of measurement for microphone array calibration, i.e. the time difference of arrival between adjacent sound events (TDOA-S) with respect to the microphone channels. We propose to use TDOA-S and TDOA-M, called hybrid TDOA, together with odometry measurements for bath SLAM-based calibration of asynchronous microphone arrays. Extensive simulation and real-world experiments show that our method is more independent of microphone number, less sensitive to initial values (when using off-the-shelf algorithms such as Gauss-Newton iterations), and has better calibration accuracy and robustness under various TDOA noises. Simulation results also demonstrate that our method has a lower Cram\'er-Rao lower bound (CRLB) for microphone parameters. To benefit the community, we open-source our code and data at https://github.com/AISLAB-sustech/Hybrid-TDOA-Calib.

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Chengjie Zhang, Jiang Wang, He Kong. 2024-03-09. Asynchronous Microphone Array Calibration using Hybrid TDOA Information. https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.05791

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