Non-Line-of-Sight Sound Localization using a Single Microphone

This paper presents an acoustic non-line-of-sight localization technique that uses a single microphone and assumes only a single diffraction in the first-arrival sound. Knowing a map of the environment of interests, the proposed technique considers the frequency, time and power profiles of the received first-arrival sound. The profiles at different positions are estimated by the application of a diffraction model and compared with the measured profiles to compute the sound source position relative to the point of diffraction. A key achievement of the proposed technique is to enable non-line-of-sight localization using only one microphone without any time-consuming premeasurement. This technique is validated experimentally with two sound sources and under a couple of background noise levels.

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