Acoustic Detection and Localization Enhanced by Video Analysis

Abstract

Acoustic data have already been used for security (and military) applications such as sniper detection and gun firing localization, pedestrians and cars detection and tracking. However, in some situations, the measurement results of the acoustic data (range and bearing) alone appear to be insufficient to locate accurately targets especially because of the presence of the background noise or due to the effect of the reverberation on estimating the true time delay of arrival of the acoustic wave. Furthermore, the influence of the errors related to the sensors synchronisation is also negatively impacting. In this work, a recursive technique based on Unscented Kalman Filter (UKF) will be used to estimate the position of the acoustic source, in addition to using video data to improve the accuracy of the acoustic measurement by fusing the two types of data (acoustic and video). This combination showed through experimental results improvement in terms of target localisation accuracy.