Mirage: 2D Source Localization Using Microphone Pair Augmentation with Echoes

It is commonly observed that acoustic echoes hurt performance of sound source localization (SSL) methods. We introduce the concept of microphone array augmentation with echoes (MIRAGE) and show how estimation of early-echo characteristics can in fact benefit SSL. We propose a learning-based scheme for echo estimation combined with a physics-based scheme for echo aggregation. In a simple scenario involving 2 microphones close to a reflective surface and one source, we show using simulated data that the proposed approach performs similarly to a correlation-based method in azimuth estimation while retrieving elevation as well from 2 microphones only, an impossible task in anechoic settings.