Design and implementation of selectable sound separation on the texai telepresence system using HARK

This paper presents the design and implementation of selectable sound separation functions on the telepresence system "Texai" using the robot audition software "HARK." An operator of Texai can "walk" around a faraway office to attend a meeting or talk with people through video-conference instead of meeting in person. With a normal microphone, the operator has difficulty recognizing the auditory scene of the Texai, e.g., he/she cannot know the number and the locations of sounds. To solve this problem, we design selectable sound separation functions with 8 microphones in two modes, overview and filter modes, and implement them using HARK's sound source localization and separation. The overview mode visualizes the direction-of-arrival of surrounding sounds, while the filter mode provides sounds that originate from the range of directions he/she specifies. The functions enable the operator to be aware of a sound even if it comes from behind the Texai, and to concentrate on a particular sound. The design and implementation was completed in five days due to the portability of HARK. Experimental evaluations with actual and simulated data show that the resulting system localizes sound sources with a tolerance of 5 degrees.