Acoustic Source Localization

TNT members involved in this project:
Alexander Lange, M. Sc.
Prof. Dr.-Ing. Jörn Ostermann
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The position of an object is an important information which is necessary to accomplish many tasks. Humans, machines and other objects emit sound waves, which can be used to find their position. Examples of applications are finding a person shouting for help in a surveillance scenario or to localize a running car engine for driver assistance systems or self-driving vehicles. The passive source localization problem can be solved by the Time Difference of Arrival (TDOA) localization technique. The signals are captured at known sensor positions, then TDOAs of signal pairs are used to localize the source. The line-of-sight (LOS) condition requires a direct path between the source and the sensors. Many approaches are based on TDOA under LOS condition. In real world scenarios the LOS condition is often violated due to obstacles blocking the direct path. This makes localization approaches necessary which can handle the non-line-of-sight (NLOS) condition.

The Goal is to accurately localize an object by its emitted waves even if there is no line-of-sight to the sensor.

There are several publications which try to compensate the error introduced by the NLOS condition. These approaches provide a position of the source which is based on a best guess using statistics or other characteristics. Our approach is to use information of the surroundings to find the position of the source more accurately in NLOS conditions or mixed LOS / NLOS conditions. In theory this approach is capable to extract the exact position of the source.

Show all publications
  • Alexander Lange, Reemt Hinrichs, Jörn Ostermann
    Localized Damage Detection in Wind Turbine Rotor Blades using Airborne Acoustic Emissions
    9th Asia-Pacific Workshops on Structural Health Monitoring 2022 (APWSHM 2022), December 2022
  • Sönke Südbeck, Thomas Krause, Jörn Ostermann
    Non-Line-of-Sight Time-Difference-of-Arrival Localization with Explicit Inclusion of Geometry Information in a Simple Diffraction Scenario
    IEEE MMSP 2020 - IEEE International Workshop on Multimedia Signal Processing, September 2020
  • Thomas Krause, Jörn Ostermann
    Acoustic Emission Localization Using Airborne Sound: Where Did the Wind Turbine Rotor Blade Crack?
    9th European Workshop on Structural Health Monitoring (EWSHM), July 2018