Long-term testing of acoustic system for tracking low-flying aircraft

Stevens Institute of Technology conducted a long-term test of an acoustic system designed to track low-flying small aircraft in remote locations. The system consists of 4 nodes located between 1 and 4 km apart in a mountainous terrain. Each node is comprised of a pyramid-shaped volumetric cluster of 5 microphones, an embedded computer, and a pan-tilt-zoom camera steered to detected targets in real time. A communication device was used to transfer data to a centralized location. Each node estimates the direction of arrival toward the sound sources and sends it along to a central processing computer. The central computer combines the data from all nodes to generate tracks and classify targets. The duration and the scale of the deployment allowed to identify and solve many problems, including the effects of propagation delays between nodes on cooperative localization and tracking, the seasonal changes in environmental noise, persistent and transient noise sources, and the diversity of targets of opportunity and their signatures. The propagation delay effects led to the development of separate trackers for review of target trajectories and for immediate action such as automatically steering the camera.