Abstract
AbstractThis paper investigates real-time N-dimensional wideband sound source localization in outdoor (far-field) and low-degree reverberation cases, using a simple N-microphone arrangement. Outdoor sound source localization in different climates needs highly sensitive and high-performance microphones, which are very expensive. Reduction of the microphone count is our goal. Time delay estimation (TDE)-based methods are common for N-dimensional wideband sound source localization in outdoor cases using at least N + 1 microphones. These methods need numerical analysis to solve closed-form non-linear equations leading to large computational overheads and a good initial guess to avoid local minima. Combined TDE and intensity level difference or interaural level difference (ILD) methods can reduce microphone counts to two for indoor two-dimensional cases. However, ILD-based methods need only one dominant source for accurate localization. Also, using a linear array, two mirror points are produced simultaneously (half-plane localization). We apply this method to outdoor cases and propose a novel approach for N-dimensional entire-space outdoor far-field and low reverberation localization of a dominant wideband sound source using TDE, ILD, and head-related transfer function (HRTF) simultaneously and only N microphones. Our proposed TDE-ILD-HRTF method tries to solve the mentioned problems using source counting, noise reduction using spectral subtraction, and HRTF. A special reflector is designed to avoid mirror points and source counting used to make sure that only one dominant source is active in the localization area. The simple microphone arrangement used leads to linearization of the non-linear closed-form equations as well as no need for initial guess. Experimental results indicate that our implemented method features less than 0.2 degree error for angle of arrival and less than 10% error for three-dimensional location finding as well as less than 150-ms processing time for localization of a typical wideband sound source such as a flying object (helicopter).
Highlights
We propose a novel method to have 2D whole-plane and 3D entirespace dominant sound source localization using Time delay estimation (TDE), interaural level difference (ILD), and headrelated transfer function (HRTF)-based methods simultaneously (TDEILD-HRTF method)
Noise reduction using spectral subtraction In order to apply ILD in TDE-ILD-based dual microphone 2D sound source localization, source counting is used to find that one dominant high SNR source is active in localization area
In this paper, we reported on the simulation of TDEILD-based 2D half-plane sound source localization using only two microphones
Summary
Source localization has been one of the fundamental problems in sonar [1], radar [2], teleconferencing or videoconferencing [3], mobile phone location [4], navigation and global positioning systems (GPS) [5], localization of earthquake epicenters and underground explosions [6], microphone arrays [7], robots [8], microseismic events in mines [9], sensor networks [10,11], tactile interaction in novel tangible human-computer interfaces [12], speaker tracking [13], surveillance [14], and sound source tracking [15]. Some papers were published which tried to apply HRTF along with TDE for azimuth and elevation angle of arrival estimation [30] According to this ability, we apply HRTF in our TDE-ILD-based localization system for solving the ambiguity in the generation of two mirror location points. There have been attempts to linearize closed-form non-linear equations through algebraic means, such as [7,16,56,63], our proposed method with simple pure geometrical linearization needs less microphones and features accurate localization and less processing time
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