MAVL: Multiresolution Analysis of Voice Localization

The ability for a smart speaker to localize a user based on his/her voice opens the door to many new applications. In this paper, we present a novel system, MAVL, to localize human voice. It consists of three major components: (i) We first develop a novel multi-resolution analysis to estimate the AoA of time-varying low-frequency coherent voice signals coming from multiple propagation paths; (ii) We then automatically estimate the room structure by emitting acoustic signals and developing an improved 3D MUSIC algorithm; (iii) We finally re-trace the paths using the estimated AoA and room structure to localize the voice. We implement a prototype system using a single speaker and a uniform circular microphone array. Our results show that it achieves median errors of 1.49 o and 3.33 o for the top two AoAs estimation and achieves median localization errors of 0.31m in line-of-sight (LoS) cases and 0.47m in non-line-of-sight (NLoS) cases.