A system and process is described for estimating the location of a speaker using
signals output by a microphone array characterized by multiple pairs of audio sensors.
The location of a speaker is estimated by first determining whether the signal
data contains human speech components and filtering out noise attributable to stationary
sources. The location of the person speaking is then estimated using a time-delay-of-arrival
based SSL technique on those parts of the data determined to contain human speech
components. A consensus location for the speaker is computed from the individual
location estimates associated with each pair of microphone array audio sensors
taking into consideration the uncertainty of each estimate. A final consensus location
is also computed from the individual consensus locations computed over a prescribed
number of sampling periods using a temporal filtering technique.