ABSTRACT:The anechoic chamber is essential tool to measure the various acoustic parameters with high precision. The chamber provides the climate controlled indoor environments but requires the dedicated room at a great cost in order to isolate and absorb sound field. Provided the purpose of the chamber is specific to the experiments of sound localization, the performance requirements excluding free field can be alleviated for cost effective solution. This paper designs low cost and profile anechoic chamber based on acoustic pyramids and evaluates the performance specified by the Annex of ISO 3745. Data analysis is employed to measure the free and hemi-free field performance over five straight paths for working areas and four paths for non-working areas. The identical two measurement campaigns were conducted for free and hemi-free field chamber which is easily interchangeable by simple labor in this chamber design. In the working area with conventional speaker, the results of these analyses demonstrate that lab-designed anechoic chamber is in conformance with ISO 3745 for 250 Hz -16 kHz one-third octave band at free field chamber and for 1 kHz -16 kHz one-third octave band at hemi-free field chamber.

Quiet submarine threats and high clutter in the littoral environment increase computation and communication demands on beamforming arrays, particularly for applications that require in-array autonomous operation. By coupling each transducer node in a distributed array with a microprocessor, and networking them together, embedded parallel processing for adaptive beamformers can glean advantages in execution speed, fault tolerance, scalability, power, and cost. In this paper, a novel set of techniques for the parallelization of adaptive beamforming algorithms is introduced for in-array sonar signal processing. A narrowband, unconstrained, Minimum Variance Distortionless Response (MVDR) beamformer is used as a baseline to investigate the efficiency and effectiveness of this method in an experimental fashion. Performance results are also included, among them execution times, parallel efficiencies, and memory requirements, using a distributed system testbed comprised of a cluster of workstations connected by a conventional network.

Vehicle-mounted sound source localization systems provide comprehensive information to improve driving conditions by monitoring the surroundings. The three-dimensional structure of vehicles hinders the omnidirectional sound localization system because of the long and uneven propagation. In the received signal, the flight times between microphones delivers the essential information to locate the sound source. This paper proposes a novel method to design a sound localization system based on the single analog microphone network. This article involves the flight time estimation for two microphones with non-parametric homomorphic deconvolution. The parametric methods are also suggested with Yule-walker, Prony, and Steiglitz-McBride algorithm to derive the coefficient values of the propagation model for flight time estimation. The non-parametric and Steiglitz-McBride method demonstrated significantly low bias and variance for 20 or higher ensemble average length. The Yule-walker and Prony algorithms showed gradually improved statistical performance for increased ensemble average length. Hence, the non-parametric and parametric homomorphic deconvolution well represent the flight time information. The derived non-parametric and parametric output with distinct length will serve as the featured information for a complete localization system based on machine learning or deep learning in future works.Sensors 2020, 20, 925 2 of 32 deliver the situation over the non-line-of-sight (NLOS) locations. Presently, the human and vehicle are cooperated to drive the transport sorely based on the vision information. Hence, indirect imminent endangerment cannot be realized until the human has the visual contact. For example, a car with emergency braking cannot be perceived by the indirect position observers. The squeal sound provides the situation. However, the system cannot recognize the direction to activate the pre-emptive safety devices which reduce or remove the impact of the secondary collisions. The sound information can be used for improving the safety of future autonomous transport system.The driver barely obtains the acoustic information since the vehicle structure debilitates the propagation by airtight cabin. The acoustic perception on sound source and arrival direction are both required to understand the situation. The SSL system mounted on a vehicle could provide the comprehensive information to improve the driving conditions by monitoring the surroundings including the NLOS observation. The conventional SSL approaches recently employed for transport are as follows. The moving vehicle presences are identified by sound localization based on the arrival time difference between the microphones [8]. A sensing technique to localize an approaching vehicle is proposed by an acoustic cue from the spatial-temporal gradient method [9]. For the sequential movement events of vehicles, robust direction-of-arrival estimation is realized by the incoherent signal-subspace method based on a small microphone array [10].The 3D structure of ve...

The acoustic wave around a sound source in the near-field area presents unconventional properties in the temporal, spectral, and spatial domains due to the propagation mechanism. This paper investigates a near-field sound localizer in a small profile structure with a single microphone. The asymmetric structure around the microphone provides a distinctive spectral variation that can be recognized by the dedicated algorithm for directional localization. The physical structure consists of ten pipes of different lengths in a vertical fashion and rectangular wings positioned between the pipes in radial directions. The sound from an individual direction travels through the nearest open pipe, which generates the particular fundamental frequency according to the acoustic resonance. The Cepstral parameter is modified to evaluate the fundamental frequency. Once the system estimates the fundamental frequency of the received signal, the length of arrival and angle of arrival (AoA) are derived by the designed model. From an azimuthal distance of 3–15 cm from the outer body of the pipes, the extensive acoustic experiments with a 3D-printed structure show that the direct and side directions deliver average hit rates of 89% and 73%, respectively. The closer positions to the system demonstrate higher accuracy, and the overall hit rate performance is 78% up to 15 cm away from the structure body.

A physical structure such as a cylindrical pipe controls the propagated sound spectrum in a predictable way that can be used to localize the sound source. This paper designs a monaural sound localization system based on multiple pyramidal horns around a single microphone. The acoustic resonance within the horn provides a periodicity in the spectral domain known as the fundamental frequency which is inversely proportional to the radial horn length. Once the system accurately estimates the fundamental frequency, the horn length and corresponding angle can be derived by the relationship. The modified Cepstrum algorithm is employed to evaluate the fundamental frequency. In an anechoic chamber, localization experiments over azimuthal configuration show that up to 61% of the proper signal is recognized correctly with 30% misfire. With a speculated detection threshold, the system estimates direction 52% in positive-to-positive and 34% in negative-to-positive decision rate, on average.