Acoustic event localization using a crosspower-spectrum phase based technique

Linear microphone arrays can be employed for acoustic event localization in a noisy environment using time delay estimation. Three techniques are investigated that allow delay estimation, namely normalized cross correlation, LMS adaptive filters, crosspower-spectrum phase: they are combined with a bidimensional representation, the coherence measure, in order to emphasize information that can be exploited for estimating position of both non-moving and moving acoustic sources. To compare the given techniques, different acoustic sources were considered, that generated events in different positions in space. Expressing performance in terms of accuracy of the wavefront direction angle, experiments showed that the crosspower-spectrum phase based technique outperforms the other two. This technique provided very promising preliminary results also in terms of source position estimation