An L-shaped microphone array configuration for impulsive acoustic source localization in 2-D using orthogonal clustering based time delay estimation

Abstract

This paper presents an L-shaped microphone array configuration for a robust 2-D localization of an impulsive acoustic source in an indoor environment. The localization technique relies on a recently proposed time delay estimation technique based on the orthogonal clustering algorithm (TDE-OC) which is designed to work under room reverberant conditions and at low sampling rates. The TDE-OC method finds the TDEs from the sparse room impulse response (RIR) signal. The TDE's obtained from RIR adds to the robustness of the TDE-OC method against room reverberations while the low sampling rates requirement reduces the hardware and computational complexity and relaxes the communication link between the microphones and the centralized location. Experimental results show the robustness of this method in a reverberant environment with low sampling rates, when compared with the generalized cross correlation method.