Position determination of acoustic source using higher-order spectral analysis for time of arrival estimation

The localization of various acoustic sources in a battlefield (such as weapon rounds, mortars, rockets, mines, improvised explosive devices, vehicle-borne improvised explosive devices and airborne vehicles) nowadays has a significant history. In acoustic source localization systems of multiple sensors, networked and placed at known positions are used to detect signals emitted from the source and perform localization of the source. Time of arrival estimation of the gun fire shock waves at large distances is significant when the purpose is the gun localization. At large distances shock wave signal is significantly deformed and therefore it is relatively difficult to accurately estimate the time of arrival. In this paper methods for TOA estimation are proposed, which are based on cumulants of the acoustic signal which originate from distant gunfire events. Localization of acoustic sources is performed in two steps by time difference estimation of acoustic signal arrival and using Discrete Probability Density method for positioning. Numerous field experiments have been conducted in order to verify performance of the proposed approach.