Detection of Point Sound Source Using Beamforming Technique in Complex Environments

Abstract

Detection and localization of acoustic events in an environment are important to protect the military and civilian installations. While there are finite paths of wave propagation in simple or low reverberant environments, in complex environments (e.g. a complex urban environment) obstacles such as terrain or buildings introduce multipath propagations, reflections and diffractions which make source localization challenging. Therefore, numeric results of simulated models (simplified and Fort Benning urban models) of 3D complex environments can highly help in real applications. Some of the conventional beamformer algorithms have been used in order to localize point sound source. Analyzing results shows that MRCB beamformer has better performance than others in this issue and its accuracy superiority is more than 3 m in simplified urban model and 5 m in Fort Benning urban model with respect to the SOC. Moreover, due to possible uncertainties between the numerical model and the actual environment such as squall effect, temperature gradient etc., sensitivity of the beamformers to temperature gradient is investigated which shows higher robustness of SOC beamformer than the MRCB beamformer. According to the results, due to gradient temperature uncertainty the accuracy degradation of the SOC is about 1m while in MRCB it alters from 0.5 m to 20 m approximately at all SNRs. COMSOL Multiphysics has been used to numerically simulate the environment of wave propagation.