Distributed low-cost microphone array for 3D localization for bio-acoustic applications

In this paper we present a multi-scale microphone array aimed at 3D source localization, with applications in bioacoustic animal tracking. We propose a hardware architecture for wirelessly synchronized sensor nodes consisting of small 5-element microphone arrays. Using this distributed sensor array we set up a probabilistic source localization problem, which we subsequently demonstrate to be able to estimate the position of a bat-like sound source in three dimensions. The proposed hardware architecture allows scalable source localization in a wide variety of application domains.