Acoustic Source Localization Fusing Sparse Direction of Arrival Estimates

Abstract

This paper proposes a wireless sensor network based acoustics source localization and tracking system. Each individual node has a special purpose sensor board with four acoustic channels and a digital compass enabling direction of arrival (DOA) estimation of acoustic sources. Upon detecting a source of interest, the sparsely deployed sensor nodes report their DOA estimates to the base station that fuses the data for accurate localization. Due to the widely distributed sensing and the novel sensor fusion technique, the method can handle multiple measurement errors prevalent in reverberant environments. The paper presents the overall architecture of the system, as well as that of the advanced sensor board. Furthermore, it describes the DOA estimation algorithm and the applied middleware services for coordinated sensing and communication, introduces the sensor fusion algorithm and presents a detailed error analysis