Spatial Cepstrum as a Spatial Feature Using a Distributed Microphone Array for Acoustic Scene Analysis

In this paper, with the aim of using the spatial information obtained from a distributed microphone array employed for acoustic scene analysis, we propose a robust and efficient method, which is called the spatial cepstrum. In our approach, similarly to the cepstrum, which is widely used as a spectral feature, the logarithm of the amplitude in multichannel observation is converted to a feature vector by a linear orthogonal transformation. This linear orthogonal transformation is achieved by principal component analysis (PCA) in general. Moreover, we also show that for a circularly symmetric microphone arrangement with an isotropic sound field, PCA is identical to the inverse discrete Fourier transform and the spatial cepstrum exactly corresponds to the cepstrum. The proposed approach does not require the positions of the microphones and is robust against the synchronization mismatch of channels, thus ensuring its suitability for use with a distributed microphone array. Experimental results obtained using actual environmental sounds verify the validity of our approach even when a smaller feature dimension than the original one is used, which is achieved by dimensionality reduction through PCA. Additionally, experimental results also indicate that the robustness of the proposed method is satisfactory for observations that have the synchronization mismatch of channels.