DoA Reliability for Distributed Acoustic Tracking

Distributed acoustic tracking estimates the trajectories of source positions using an acoustic sensor network. As it is often difficult to estimate the source-sensor range from individual nodes, the source positions have to be inferred from the direction-of-arrival (DoA) estimates. Due to reverberation and noise, the sound field becomes increasingly diffuse with increasing source-sensor distance, leading to a decreased Direction of Arrival (DoA)-estimation accuracy. To distinguish between accurate and uncertain DoA estimates, this letter proposes to incorporate the coherent-to-diffuse ratio as a measure of DoA reliability for single-source tracking. It is shown that the source positions, therefore, can be probabilistically triangulated by exploiting the spatial diversity of all nodes.