International Audio Laboratories Erlangen

Acoustic Position Estimation of a Silent Listener

The localization of objects that actively emit sound has been extensively studied. In certain situations, however, an object of interest may not emit sound while another sound source is active. For instance, this occurs when a silent human listens to music and needs to be localized to optimize the playback for the listener's position. We have developed a method for localizing silent listeners under such circumstances: By continuously estimating room impulse responses using a loudspeaker emitting a known signal and a microphone array, we can detect subtle variations in the room impulse response over time, which are induced by the listener’s motion. In our experiments, this approach is sufficient to localize a sitting listener within 35 cm accuracy 82 % and a standing listener 93 % of the time. Below you can find a simplified explanation of this localization approach, as well as the associated research paper for an in-depth explanation of the localization algorithm.

Explanation Video

References (Click to Open)

Preview_ICASSP 

@INPROCEEDINGS{Lawrence_2025_ICASSP,
  author={Lawrence, Jeremy and Tuna, Cagdas and Walther, Andreas and Peters, Nils},
  booktitle={ICASSP 2025 - 2025 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP)}, 
  title={Acoustic Position Estimation of a Silent Listener}, 
  year={2025},
  volume={},
  number={},
  pages={1-5},
  doi={10.1109/ICASSP49660.2025.10888595}}