Joint position-pitch estimation of acoustic sources for their tracking and separation

Method for localizing and tracking acoustic sources (101) in a multi-source environment, comprising the following steps:

• (a) recording of audio-signals (103) of at least one acoustic source (101) with at least two recording means (104, 105), creating a two- or multi-channel recording signal;
• (b) partitioning said recording signal into frames of predefined length (N);
• (c) calculating for each frame a cross-correlation function as a function of discrete time-lag values (τ) for channel pairs (106, 107) of the recording signal;
• (d) evaluating the cross-correlation function by calculating a sampling function depending on a pitch parameter (f0) and at least one spatial parameter (φ0), the sampling function assigning a value to every point of a multidimensional space being spanned by the pitch-parameter and the spatial parameters, said sampling function being obtained by collecting values of the cross-correlation function for a set of discrete time-lag values determined for each point in the multidimensional space;
• (e) identifying peaks in said multidimensional space with respective acoustic sources in the multi-source environment.