Acoustic Source Localisation using Coincident Microphone Arrays

.58. Jahrestagung der Österreichischen Physikalischen Gesellschaft, Montanuniversität Leoben, Österreich, 22.-26. September, 2008.

Microphone arrays can be designed to provide the possibility to determine and further to track the position of sound sources. The term microphone array is usually related to an arrangement of several microphones of the same type placed at different locations. Within this paper, however, algorithms for sound source localisation using coincident - and thus space-saving - microphone arrays will be treated. The performance and robustness of the localization is dependent on several influencing variables, e.g. the frequency of the sound source, the level of disturbing sound sources and, as a part of these, also reflections that occur at a given room-setting. The performance of our approach is thus analysed with respect to all those listed variables. For that purpose, we developed a simulation tool in MATLAB to examine and visualise the real and estimated sound source position for different variable settings. Beside the usage of simulated microphones and distributed sound sources even real-world measurements and -recordings can be treated. Thus sound source localisation using coincident microphone array technology can be evaluated both in theory and practice.

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