An Accurate Algebraic Closed-Form Solution for Energy-Based Source Localization

The localization of an acoustic source can be based on the energy measurements at a number of spatially separated microphones. This is because the amount of source energy attenuation at a microphone is proportional to the square of the distance between the source and the microphone. This paper develops an algebraic closed-form solution for the acoustic source localization problem using energy measurements, under the condition of direct line-of-sight and free space propagation. First-order analysis is applied to the proposed solution to study its performance, where only the linear noise terms are kept in obtaining the mean-square localization error. The first-order analytical results show that the proposed solution reaches the Cramer-Rao lower bound (CRLB) accuracy for Gaussian noise as the signal-to-noise ratio tends to infinity. In addition, the proposed solution provides much better accuracy than other closed-form solutions available in literature. Improvement on the proposed solution that extends its operating range beyond the threshold noise level was made by imposing nonnegative constraints. Simulations are included to corroborate the performance of the proposed method.