Content Gazette - March 2018 - 28

IEEE Journal on Selected Topics in Signal Processing
Special Issue on

Acoustic source localization and tracking in dynamic real-life scenes
Summary: Acoustic source localization is a well-studied topic in signal processing, but most traditional
methods incorporate simplifying assumptions such as a point source, free-field propagation of the sound
wave, static acoustic sources, time-invariant sensor constellations, and simple noise fields. However,
these assumptions may be seriously violated in a range of emerging applications, such as audio recording
with mobile devices (e.g. cell phones, extreme cameras, and robots), video conferencing on the go, and
recording for 3D reproduction and virtual reality. In these applications, the environment is extremely
challenging, with spatially distributed sources, reverberation, complex noise fields, multiple concurrent
speakers, interferences, and time-varying sources and sensors positions.
The proposed special issue aims to present recent advances in the development of signal processing
methods for localization and tracking of acoustic sources and the associated theory and applications. To
address the challenges raised by the real-life environment, novel methods that use modern array
processing, speech processing and data inference tools, become a necessity.
As these challenges involve both audio processing and sensor arrays, this proposal is timely and relevant
to researchers from both acoustic signal processing domain and array processing domain. The guest
editors are therefore coming from both communities. It comprises of current and past chairs of the
respective technical committees (Audio and Acoustic Signal Processing - AASP and Sensor and Sensor
Array and Multichannel - SAM TCs). This special issue proposal follows successful special sessions in major
conferences: "Learning-based Sound Source Localization and Spatial Information Retrieval" (ICASSP2016),
"Speaker localization in dynamic real-life environments" (ICASSP2017), "Acoustic Scene Analysis and
Signal Enhancement using Microphone Array" (EUSIPCO2017), "Acoustical Signal Processing for
Hearables" (EUSIPCO2017).
Topics of interest include (but are not limited to):
 Localization in multipath and reverberant environments
 Tracking moving sources
 Performance bounds on localization and tracking
 Dynamic platforms for localization and tracking (e.g. robots, cell phones, hearables, hearing aids)
 Binaural localization using head-related transfer functions (HRTFs)
 Localization "behind the walls"
 Distributed algorithms for wireless acoustic sensor networks (WASNs) for localization
 Simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM)
 Acoustic scene analysis
 Detection and localization acoustic events (e.g. falls, footsteps)
 Learning-based localization (e.g. dimensionality-reduction, regression, clustering, classification,
sparse representations, dictionary learning)

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Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Content Gazette - March 2018
