Locata challenge - evaluation tasks and measures

Sound source localization and tracking algorithms provide estimates of the positional information about active sound sources in acoustic environments. Despite substantial advances and significant interest in the research community, a comprehensive benchmarking campaign of the various approaches using a common database of audio recordings has, to date, not been performed. The aim of the IEEE-AASP Challenge on sound source localization and tracking (LOCATA) is to objectively benchmark state-of-the-art localization and tracking algorithms using an open-access data corpus of recordings for scenarios typically encountered in audio and acoustic signal processing applications. The challenge tasks range from the localization of a single source with a static microphone array to tracking of multiple moving sources with a moving microphone array. This paper provides an overview of the challenge tasks, describes the performance measures used for evaluation of the LOCATA Challenge, and presents baseline results for the development dataset.