There is an increasing need for robust localization of signal sources of various types. With recent developments in sensory instrumentation, some of these needs can be answered. These new developments have also introduced new requirements. Sensor arrays and networks operate for long periods of time, perhaps unattended, and hardware malfunctions may occur between scheduled maintenance. Sensor systems should be able to detect and compensate for hardware failures. This paper presents a new method to detect and compensate for a failure of one sensor in an array performing time delay based direction of arrival (DOA) estimation. The method utilizes confidence factors based on the planar wave assumption. The proposed method is combined with time delay based DOA estimators and tested with simulations. Results indicate that the given method can be used to detect the failed sensor and improve DOA estimation performance when a failure has occurred.
Increasing demand for automatic large area surveillance has made methods estimating direction of arrival (DOA), especially acoustic methods, an interesting topic. In these systems false alarms and faults are a disturbing factor. This paper presents a reliability criterion and a new method to diminish these errors. In very low signal-to-noise ratio conditions there arc seldom any means to improve the performance of a DQA estimator. In these cases it is important to have some information about the estimation reliability. Our focus is on wideband signals propagating as planar waves in three dimensional space. If the estimation method makes no assumptions on the signal propagation speed, it is possible to compute a reliability measure for obtained estimates. With this reliability measure we are able to decide whether the data produced by a time delay based DQA estimation system is usable or not. Indeed, with this criterion an estimation system can state its own reliability.
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