An FPGA off-loading of HARK sound source localization

Abstract

HARK is open-source software for robot auditions, including auditory functions using a microphone array. The primary tasks of robot audition are sound source localization (SSL), sound source separation, and automatic speech recognition of the separated speech. In particular, SSL is the fundamental function among them, which detects the number and position of sound sources. For high-speed yet low-power processing of the SSL, we implement it on an FPGA board with an SoC-type Xilinx Zynq Ultrascale+. Since the whole processing of the SSL is complicated, we off-loaded two core functions, AddCorrelation and Added NormalizeCorrelation, on the hardwired logic. Approximately 295 times and 365 times, performance improvements were achieved compared with software execution.