Energy based collaborative source localization using acoustic micro-sensor array

A novel sensor network source localization method based on acoustic energy measurements is presented. This method makes use of the characteristics that the acoustic energy decays exponentially with respect to the distance from an omni-directional acoustic source. By comparing energy readings measured at surrounding acoustic sensors during the same time interval can be accurately estimated. We show that the potential target location is restricted to a hyper-sphere in the sensor field given the acoustic energy reading at a pair of sensors. Given multiple sensor acoustic energy readings, the target location is solved as the location that is closest (in the least square sense) to all the corresponding hyper-spheres. We further simplified this nonlinear least square problem to an unconstrained linear least square problem that yields a closed form solution. Experiment results using military vehicle acoustic data show great promise of this novel approach.