Acoustic direction finding in highly reverberant environment with single acoustic vector sensor

Abstract

We propose a novel wideband acoustic direction finding method for highly reverberant environments using measurements from a single Acoustic Vector Sensor (AVS). Since an AVS is small in size and can be effectively used within the full acoustic frequency bands, the proposed solution is suitable for wideband acoustic source localization. In particular, we introduce a novel approach to extract the signal portions that are not distorted with multipath signals and noise. We do not make any stochastic and sparseness assumptions regarding the underlying signal source. Hence, our approach can be applied to a wide range of wideband acoustic signals. We present experiments with acoustic signals that are specially exposed to long reverberations, where the Signal-to-Noise Ratio is as low as 0 dB. In these experiments, the proposed method reliably estimates the source direction with less than 5 degrees of error even under the introduced significantly high reverberation conditions.