Scattering of Urban Sound Energy from High-Performance Computations

The US Armypsilas unattended ground sensors operating in urban terrain will rely in part on acoustic components to detect, classify, and locate sources of interest. Optimal sensing and processing of acoustic signals will require understanding of the scattering of sound waves by urban structures. Our objective is to apply high-performance computations to statistically quantify acoustic scattering and multi-path interference as a function of urban-terrain type. The results include wave-field interference maps in different types of urban terrain and statistically generated signal fading and coherence functions of range and frequency. We examine the usefulness of these functions for acoustic sensor-placement decision support, and show that urban wave-field computations can provide parameters needed for statistical models of sensor performance.