Self-localization of wireless acoustic sensors in meeting rooms

This paper presents a passive acoustic self-localization and synchronization system, which estimates the positions of wireless acoustic sensors utilizing the signals emitted by the persons present in the same room. The system is designed to utilize common off-the-shelf devices such as mobile phones. Once devices are self-localized and synchronized, the system could be utilized by traditional array processing methods. The proposed calibration system is evaluated with real recordings from meeting scenarios. The proposed system builds on earlier work with the added contribution of this work is i) increasing the accuracy of positioning, and ii) introduction data-driven data association. The results show that improvement over the existing methods in all tested recordings with 10 smartphones.

[1]  Julius O. Smith,et al.  Closed-form least-squares source location estimation from range-difference measurements , 1987, IEEE Trans. Acoust. Speech Signal Process..

[2]  Kung Yao,et al.  Source localization and beamforming , 2002, IEEE Signal Process. Mag..

[3]  Ivan Himawan,et al.  Microphone Array Shape Calibration in Diffuse Noise Fields , 2008, IEEE Transactions on Audio, Speech, and Language Processing.

[4]  Sebastian Thrun,et al.  Affine Structure From Sound , 2005, NIPS.

[5]  K. J. Ray Liu,et al.  Handbook on Array Processing and Sensor Networks , 2010 .

[6]  Piet Sommen,et al.  Error analysis on source localization in ad-hoc wireless microphone networks , 2010 .

[7]  David G. Stork,et al.  Pattern classification, 2nd Edition , 2000 .

[8]  Harvey F. Silverman,et al.  A Linear Closed-Form Algorithm for Source Localization From Time-Differences of Arrival , 2008, IEEE Signal Processing Letters.

[9]  P. Groenen,et al.  Modern multidimensional scaling , 1996 .

[10]  Rainer Lienhart,et al.  Position calibration of microphones and loudspeakers in distributed computing platforms , 2005, IEEE Transactions on Speech and Audio Processing.

[11]  G. Carter,et al.  The generalized correlation method for estimation of time delay , 1976 .

[12]  K. J. Ray Liu,et al.  Handbook on Array Processing and Sensor Networks: Haykin/Array Processing , 2010 .

[13]  Matti S. Hämäläinen,et al.  Passive self-localization of microphones using ambient sounds , 2012, 2012 Proceedings of the 20th European Signal Processing Conference (EUSIPCO).

[14]  Nobutaka Ito,et al.  Blind alignment of asynchronously recorded signals for distributed microphone array , 2009, 2009 IEEE Workshop on Applications of Signal Processing to Audio and Acoustics.

[15]  Matti S. Hämäläinen,et al.  Passive Temporal Offset Estimation of Multichannel Recordings of an Ad-Hoc Microphone Array , 2013, IEEE Transactions on Audio, Speech, and Language Processing.

[16]  Shigeo Abe DrEng Pattern Classification , 2001, Springer London.

[17]  M. Moonen,et al.  Time-domain generalized cross correlation phase transform sound source localization for small microphone arrays , 2012, 2012 5th European DSP Education and Research Conference (EDERC).