Use of unidirectional microphones and signal processing for the localization of sound sources

Targeting people or objects by passive acoustic sensors is of relevant interest in several military and civil applications, spanning from surveillance and patrolling systems to teleconferencing and human-robot interaction. To date methods and patents focused solely on the use of beamforming algorithms to compute the time of arrival of sounds detected by using omnidirectional microphones (OM) sparsely deployed. This paper describes the preliminary results of a novel approach devoted to the localization of ground borne acoustic sources. It is demonstrated that an array made of at least three unidirectional microphones can be exploited to detect the position the source. Pulse features extracted either in the time domain or in the frequency domain are used to identify the direction of the incoming sound. This information is then fed into a semi-analytical algorithm devoted to the identification of the source location. The novelty of the method presented here consists on the use of unidirectional microphones rather than omnidirectional microphones and on the ability to extract the sound direction by considering features like the pulse amplitude rather than the pulse arrival time. It is believed that this method may pave the road toward a new generation of reduced size sound detectors and localizers.