This work presents a novel two-step algorithm to estimate the orientation of speakers in a smart-room environment equipped with microphone arrays. First the position of the speaker is estimated by the SRP-PHAT algorithm, and the time delay of arrival for each microphone pair with respect to the detected position is computed. In the second step, the value of the cross-correlation at the estimated time delay is used as the fundamental characteristic from where to derive the speaker orientation. The proposed method performs consistently better than other state-of-the-art acoustic techniques with a purposely recorded database and the CLEAR head pose database.

Index Terms: Head pose; speaker orientation; acoustic source localization