Acoustic source localization in sensor networks with low communication bandwidth

A new acoustic localization scheme is proposed, which can be applied in sensor networks with low communication bandwidth. The first step of the two-stage algorithm is distributed and is evaluated at the sensors having possibly low communication capabilities. The sensors detect various events in the acoustic signal and transmit only the event descriptors to the base station where the sensor fusion is calculated in the second step using a novel generalized consistency function. Test results validate the performance of the proposed system in a noisy and reverberant environment. According to experiments, the proposed system decreases the necessary communication bandwidth with multiple orders of magnitude and still provides high accuracy comparable with that of the sophisticated beam-forming methods