Identity-Assisted Association of Unordered DOA Estimates for Neural Speech Source Tracking
This study addresses the data association ambiguity in unordered direction-of-arrival (DOA) estimation caused by speech intermittency, spatial proximity, and complex acoustic environments. To this end, we propose an identity-assisted multi-speaker tracking method that innovatively fuses long-term stable speaker embeddings with short-term continuous spatial cues. A unified neural tracker is designed to map multi-source observations into consistent identity trajectories by leveraging a temporal self-attention module to capture trajectory evolution and a source attention mechanism to disambiguate competing tracks. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed approach effectively mitigates association confusion under multi-source competition, significantly enhancing the reliability of speech source tracking in complex scenarios.