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.
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