Counting and Localization of Multiple Unknown Harmonic Sound Sources in Entire 3D Space Using Just Five Microphones

Abstract

Counting and localization of multiple sound sources in an unknown environment has many applications, namely fault diagnosis of complex machineries, hearing aids' development, and localization of enemy vehicles in defense. However, multiple sound source localization is extremely challenging because it requires numerous microphones, which increases the cost, computational time, and installation difficulties. Here, we present a new method to count the number of stationary harmonic sound sources and localize them in a free-field environment using a novel oblique square pyramid shaped array of only 5 microphones. We find FFT peaks of microphone signals and compare the ratio of the magnitude of the most dominant peak with remaining peaks' one-by-one. If these ratios are below 25 dB difference, they are considered as sound source and counted. A new time delay and intensity ratio computation is applied to the segregated source signals to calculate exact coordinates of each source. Simulation studies of four concurrent sources show that our method predicts all sources' coordinates at every octant location with mean error of 3.4%, and less than 5% error beyond 20 dB Signal-to-Noise ratio. Mean computational time is 0.92 second. Therefore, our method is low-cost, quicker, more accurate and more reliable than existing techniques.