Soft label coding for end-to-end sound source localization with ad-hoc microphone arrays

Recently, an end-to-end two-dimensional sound source localization algorithm with ad-hoc microphone arrays formulates the sound source localization problem as a classification problem. The algorithm divides the target indoor space into a set of local areas, and predicts the local area where the speaker locates. However, the local areas are encoded by one-hot code, which may lose the connections between the local areas due to quantization errors. In this paper, we propose a new soft label coding method, named label smoothing, for the classification-based two-dimensional sound source location with ad-hoc microphone arrays. The core idea is to take the geometric connection between the classes into the label coding process. The first one is named static soft label coding (SSLC), which modifies the one-hot codes into soft codes based on the distances between the local areas. Because SSLC is handcrafted which may not be optimal, the second one, named dynamic soft label coding (DSLC), further rectifies SSLC, by learning the soft codes according to the statistics of the predictions produced by the classification-based localization model in the training stage. Experimental results show that the proposed label smoothing methods can effectively improve the localization accuracy.