The geometry of sound-source localization using non-coplanar microphone arrays

This paper addresses the task of sound-source localization from time delay estimates using arbitrarily shaped non-coplanar microphone arrays. We fully exploit the direct path propagation model and our contribution is threefold: we provide a necessary and sufficient condition for a set of time delays to correspond to a sound source position, a proof of the uniqueness of this position, and a localization mapping to retrieve it. The time delay estimation task is casted into a non-linear multivariate optimization problem constrained by necessary and sufficient conditions on time delays. Two global optimization techniques to estimate time delays and localize the sound source are investigated. We report an extensive set of experiments and comparisons with state-of-the-art methods on simulated and real data in the presence of noise and reverberations.