Acoustical Beamforming with Distance Estimation (vor Ort)
* Presenting author
Abstract:
The topic of this paper is the automatized determination of the position and trajectory of sound sources by acoustic measurements with microphone arrays. The base idea of the process is the suitable delay and amplification of the sound signals received by the sensors. The exact delay and amplification values are defined by beamforming algorithms, one of the most well-known being the so-called MUSIC (Multiple Signal Classification) algorithm. This method separates the cross-spectral matrix of the received signals to signal and noise subspaces. Its popularity is due to its simplicity and relatively high accuracy. Beamforming can be used to focus on different points in the space and assess the likelihood of a sound source being in their vicinity. Previously, we devised a method to estimate the direction and the distance of sound sources. Direction estimation is already an extensively discussed topic when it comes to beamforming. Our distance estimation method showed promising results during simulations, but when processing measurement data, it failed to perform satisfactorily due to less favourable environmental conditions. Our goal is to devise and test a more accurate and reliable, although presumably slower algorithm that could be optimized in the future.
