An Analytical Method for 3-D Sound Source Localization Based on a Five-Element Microphone Array

An analytical method for 3-D sound source localization based on a five-element microphone array is proposed in this work. With four time-difference-of-arrival (TDOA) values, the proposed method realizes the sound source localization by analytical solution. A new five-element microphone array configuration (which is characterized in that four microphones are in the same plane and at four vertices of a concave quadrilateral respectively, while the fifth microphone is out of the plane) is analyzed and studied. It is proven that with the proposed configuration, the five-element microphone array can obtain a unique and analytical solution. To investigate the effectiveness and the localization performance of the proposed method, a practical five-element microphone array is developed and 3-D sound source localization experiments are carried out. The TDOA values are obtained by the generalized cross correlation (GCC) method based on the phase transform (PHAT). The experimental results show that the proposed method is an effective near-field localization method. The localization performance of the practical five-element microphone array is satisfactory. Compared with the conventional methods, the proposed method realizes the 3-D localization by analytical solution and has the advantages of simple construction and lower computational complexity.