Estimation of the location of a farfield acoustic source

Abstract

A backward integration method for estimating the location of a source of sound waves in the atmosphere is presented. This geometric acoustics method is based upon the analysis of microphone array measurements to determine the incoming ray direction in three dimensions. The equations governing the propagation of the ray are then integrated backward in time. The sound source lies somewhere along the calculated ray path. The intersection of such loci from more than one array would provide an estimate of the source location. The method appears to be very rapid to implement and, assuming the time delays to be accurately measured, limited in accuracy only by the timeliness of the input sound speed and velocity profiles in the atmosphere.

Solution of underdetermined systems of equations with gridded a priori constraints

“…The concept of intersecting geometric loci, on which the proposed method is based, is of course not new, and has been widely used. For instance, intersections of circles, planes, spheres, tori are also used to determine positioning in robotics (Sokolov and Xirouchakis 2006 ; Ren and Hong 2009 ), while sources of sound can be defined as intersections of hyperboloids (Hardin et al 2005 ).…”