Estimating direction of arrival in reverberant environments for wake-word detection using a single structural...

The vibrational response of an elastic panel to incident acoustic waves is determined by the direction-of-arrival (DOA) of the waves relative to the spatial structure of the panel's bending modes. By monitoring the relative modal excitations of a panel immersed in a sound field, the DOA of the source may be inferred. In reverberant environments, early acoustic reflections and the late diffuse acoustic field may obscure the DOA of incoming sound waves. Panel microphones may be especially susceptible to the effects of reverberation due to their large surface areas and long-decaying impulse responses. An investigation into the effect of reverberation on the accuracy of DOA estimation with panel microphones was made by recording wake-word utterances in eight spaces with reverberation times (RT60s) ranging from 0.27 to 3.00 s. The responses were used to train neural networks to estimate the DOA. Within ±5°, DOA estimation reliability was measured at 95.00% in the least reverberant space, decreasing to 78.33% in the most reverberant space, suggesting an inverse relationship between RT60 and DOA accuracy. Experimental results suggest that a system for estimating DOA with panel microphones can generalize to new acoustic environments by cross-training the system with data from multiple spaces with different RT60s.