Research on acoustic source localization using time difference of arrival measurements

Time difference of arrival (TDOA) technology has been widely used in positioning and navigation system recently. This paper first introduces and analyzes the basic principle of acoustic source localization using time difference of arrival (TDOA) measurements. Time difference measurement is a key problem in TDOA location method for its accuracy directly determines the position estimation accuracy of the location system. Generalized cross-correlation (GCC) method can weaken the impact of noise on the delay estimation accuracy so this method is adopted in the paper to obtain TDOA measurement by detecting the peak position of the correlation function of two signals. Through the analysis of TDOA location algorithm, an improved Taylor algorithm with 10 iterations is proposed to solve the location coordinate of the acoustic source. This algorithm can achieve a higher accuracy with relatively smaller calculation. In order to forecast system performance, MATLAB simulations are realized for an acoustic source localization system using microphone array. Finally, the implementation of location system and actual test results are presented. In the actual environment, positioning errors are within 3 cm with microphone array element spacing of 50 cm and it is shown the implemented system can be applied to acoustic source localization.