Asynchronous Microphone Array Calibration using Hybrid TDOA Information

Asynchronous Microphone array calibration is a prerequisite for most audition robot applications. In practice, the calibration requires estimating microphone positions, time offsets, clock drift rates, and sound event locations simultaneously. The existing method proposed Graph-based Simultaneous Localisation and Mapping (Graph-SLAM) utilizing common TDOA, time difference of arrival between two microphones (TDOA-M), and odometry measurement, however, it heavily depends on the initial value. In this paper, we propose a novel TDOA, time difference of arrival between adjacent sound events (TDOA-S), combine it with TDOA-M, called hybrid TDOA, and add odometry measurement to construct Graph-SLAM and use the Gauss-Newton (GN) method to solve. TDOA-S is simple and efficient because it eliminates time offset without generating new variables. Simulation and real-world experiment results consistently show that our method is independent of microphone number, insensitive to initial values, and has better calibration accuracy and stability under various TDOA noises. In addition, the simulation result demonstrates that our method has a lower Cram\'er-Rao lower bound (CRLB) for microphone parameters, which explains the advantages of my method.

MotionTrack: End-to-End Transformer-based Multi-Object Tracing with LiDAR-Camera Fusion

Multiple Object Tracking (MOT) is crucial to autonomous vehicle perception. End-to-end transformer-based algorithms, which detect and track objects simultaneously, show great potential for the MOT task. However, most existing methods focus on image-based tracking with a single object category. In this paper, we propose an end-to-end transformer-based MOT algorithm (MotionTrack) with multi-modality sensor inputs to track objects with multiple classes. Our objective is to establish a transformer baseline for the MOT in an autonomous driving environment. The proposed algorithm consists of a transformer-based data association (DA) module and a transformer-based query enhancement module to achieve MOT and Multiple Object Detection (MOD) simultaneously. The MotionTrack and its variations achieve better results (AMOTA score at 0.55) on the nuScenes dataset compared with other classical baseline models, such as the AB3DMOT, the CenterTrack, and the probabilistic 3D Kalman filter. In addition, we prove that a modified attention mechanism can be utilized for DA to accomplish the MOT, and aggregate history features to enhance the MOD performance.