A simple microphone array for source direction and distance estimation

In this paper, a simple microphone array is proposed to estimate the direction and distance of a sound source in 2D space. The microphone array consists of three elements and these microphones are arranged in cross form. Based on the geometrical relationship and the estimated time delays between each pair of microphones, a method is proposed to directly get the direction and distance of the sound source in near field. The computational complexity of the proposed method is very low and the implementation of the algorithm is simple. Simulation results show that the algorithm effectively finds the position of the sound source. Therefore, the proposed method is suitable for practical low cost applications, such as steering video camera in video-conference and providing source location in microphone array beamforming, etc.