Multi-Sound-Source Localization Using Machine Learning for Small Autonomous Unmanned Vehicles with a Self-Rotating Bi-Microphone Array
This addresses the lack of sound-source localization capabilities for SAUVs, which is an incremental improvement over existing vision-based methods.
The paper tackles the problem of enabling small autonomous unmanned vehicles (SAUVs) to localize multiple sound sources in 3D using a self-rotating bi-microphone array, achieving correct identification of sound source numbers and orientations in reverberant environments.
Abstract While vision-based localization techniques have been widely studied for small autonomous unmanned vehicles (SAUVs), sound-source localization capabilities have not been fully enabled for SAUVs. This paper presents two novel approaches for SAUVs to perform three-dimensional (3D) multi-sound-sources localization (MSSL) using only the inter-channel time difference (ICTD) signal generated by a self-rotating bi-microphone array. The proposed two approaches are based on two machine learning techniques viz., Density-Based Spatial Clustering of Applications with Noise (DBSCAN) and Random Sample Consensus (RANSAC) algorithms, respectively, whose performances are tested and compared in both simulations and experiments. The results show that both approaches are capable of correctly identifying the number of sound sources along with their 3D orientations in a reverberant environment.