Hardware implementation of a wireless impulsive source localization system

Acoustic source localization systems are becoming an essential part of any modern security system and their accuracy and performance play an important role in the overall structure of such systems. Any acoustic source localization system should be robust enough to work in any real situation like in an indoor or an outdoor environment. This thesis work focuses on the implementation of an impulsive acoustic source localization system using a new algorithm known as Orthogonal Clustering (OC) by utilizing different wireless signal acquisition hardware and devices. The implementation is carried out using both this new algorithm (i.e. OC) and the conventional Cross Correlation (CC) for comparison purposes. Three different sensor geometries were considered for implementation to observe the effect of the sensor geometry on the performance of the localization system. Three different wireless hardware systems were used to implement the localization system to verify, compare and analyze the performance of the new algorithm as well as the CC method. A practical and realistic approach is taken for the implementation of the localization system by implementing it in three-dimensions (3D). To check the consistency and accuracy of the new algorithm as well as of the hardware system the implementation was carried out both in an indoor and outdoor environments. To further verify the consistency of the system in the indoor environment, experiments were carried out both in a less-reverberant environment like the center of a hall and a more-reverberant environment like in a corner of the hall. To analyze the system for computational complexity versus the performance tradeoff the system was implemented for signal acquisition at different sampling rates. From experiments it was observed that the Pyramid geometry of the sensors was the best among all the geometries accuracy wise. In indoor less-reverberant environment the performance of the OC algorithm was better than the CC algorithm. However, in outdoor environment the CC algorithm produces more accurate results than the OC. Furthermore, the runtime of the CC algorithm (less than a second) is much less than the OC algorithm (more than 10 seconds). The RevoLabs system produces more accurate and consistent results than the VocoPro system. Keywords: Acoustic Source Localization, Indoor Source Localization, Outdoor Source Localization, Impulsive Acoustics, Wireless Sensor Networks, Commercial off the Shelf Devices