3D Audiovisual Speaker Tracking with Distributed Sensors Configuration

Smart spaces are environments equipped with a set of sensors with the main objective of understanding humans’ behavior within them, their interactions and to improve human-machine interfaces. Audiovisual tracking is used to know people’s position in the environment and if they are talking, through the use of cameras and microphones. In this work we present an audiovisual tracking solution with a single camera and microphone array in a distributed configuration. Our idea is to exploit the estimation of azimuth and elevation from audio information to be fused with the position estimation obtained from a Viola and Jones based observation model. The fact that the microphone array is not co-located with the camera will allow to reduce the distance estimation uncertainty from the video model and improve tracking accuracy. The system was evaluated on the AV16.3 database on single speaker sequences, outperforming results of state-of-the-art, under these conditions.