Development of the application of the digital microphone array system for real time source localization

Abstract

This research is to develop a digital microphone array system to build a real-time sound source localization system and to produce acoustical holography. Acoustical holography can be understood as taking a photo of sound which can be used to source localization. In the situation of free field with an unknown signal, source signal is restored by time reversal mirror(TRM) where a free-field impulse response function(IRF) is used to achieve the goal of real time source localization. During the processing, the unknown source location is identified by scanning over a possible space for source locations to find a maximum restored signal. In the present study, simulations and experiments of source localization are carried out in 2D and 3D space. In the experiment of source localization with single source, the estimation errors are below 10% in certain distances between source and microphone array. For two sources situation, the distance between two sources will limit the application of the present approach.