Microphone Utility-based Weighting for Robust Acoustic Source Localization in Wireless Acoustic Sensor Networks

Spatially distributed network nodes in Wireless Acoustic Sensor Networks (WASNs) offer different perspectives of an acoustic scene. While the spatial information contained in all recorded signals can in principle be exploited to determine the position of an acoustic Source of Interest (SoI), in challenging acoustic conditions, the observations provided by different network nodes are not equally reliable. Thus, accurately estimating the reliability of the nodes’ observations and incorporating them during the localization procedure is crucial, potentially even excluding observations. In this contribution, we demonstrate how a recently proposed general-purpose microphone utility measure based on the correlation of single-channel feature streams can improve the localization accuracy when triangulating an acoustic source from node-wise Direction of Arrival (DOA) estimates.