Acoustic source localization with high performance sensor nodes

Abstract

Distributed wireless sensor networks consisting of several single sensors are becoming very popular in many important applications. The widespread proliferation of low-cost sensor nodes is plagued by several technical challenges namely resource (e.g. bandwidth and battery power) constraints, reliability and health of sensors, and more importantly computational limitations of the nodes. The computational capabilities of low-cost distributed sensor nodes can be enhanced by inexpensive sensor boards that give the nodes the ability to preprocess the captured signals for sensor-level detection, feature extraction and direction of arrival (DOA) estimation. This paper presents a custom designed sensor board that can be interfaced with typical zigbee-based motes for multichannel sensor-level data processing. The design is around FPGA supporting real-time data processing using five acoustic channels that can be used for numerous applications such as vehicle detection and tracking and acoustic transient (e.g. gunshots) localization. In this paper, the results on acoustic transient detection using our custom designed board sources will be presented.