Acoustic Source Localization with Distributed Smartphone Arrays

Acoustic source localization in sensor network is a challenging task because of severe constraints on cost, energy, and effective range of sensor devices. To overcome limitations in existing solutions, this paper formally describes, designs, implements, and evaluates a Hamming Distance-based Method for Acoustic Source Localization, i.e., HammingLoc, in distributed smartphone networks. The key idea behind HammingLoc is to turn the localization problem into search problem in Hamming space. Time Differences of Arrival (TDOAs) of signals pertaining the same smartphone are estimated through the simple Generalized Cross-Correlation method. After the quantization with a bit for the TDOA measurement from the smartphone nodes, source localization is performed by minimizing the Hamming distance between the measured binary sequence and the binary vectors in a database. The proposed design is evaluated through theoretical analysis, extensive simulations, and physical experiments (an indoor test-bed with 30 smartphone nodes). Evaluation results demonstrate that HammingLoc can effectively localize the acoustic source with good robustness.