Emitter Location Finding using Particle Swarm Optimization

Using several spatially separated receivers, nowadays positioning techniques, which are implemented to determine the location of the transmitter, are often required for several important disciplines such as military, security, medical, and commercial applications. In this study, localization is carried out by particle swarm optimization using time difference of arrival. In order to increase the positioning accuracy, time difference of arrival averaging based two new methods are proposed. Results are compared with classical algorithms and Cramer-Rao lower bound which is the theoretical limit of the estimation error

Source localization and denoising: a perspective from the TDOA space

In this manuscript, we formulate the problem of denoising Time Differences of Arrival (TDOAs) in the TDOA space, i.e. the Euclidean space spanned by TDOA measurements. The method consists of pre-processing the TDOAs with the purpose of reducing the measurement noise. The complete set of TDOAs (i.e., TDOAs computed at all microphone pairs) is known to form a redundant set, which lies on a linear subspace in the TDOA space. Noise, however, prevents TDOAs from lying exactly on this subspace. We therefore show that TDOA denoising can be seen as a projection operation that suppresses the component of the noise that is orthogonal to that linear subspace. We then generalize the projection operator also to the cases where the set of TDOAs is incomplete. We analytically show that this operator improves the localization accuracy, and we further confirm that via simulation.Comment: 25 pages, 9 figure

TDOA--based localization in two dimensions: the bifurcation curve

In this paper, we complete the study of the geometry of the TDOA map that encodes the noiseless model for the localization of a source from the range differences between three receivers in a plane, by computing the Cartesian equation of the bifurcation curve in terms of the positions of the receivers. From that equation, we can compute its real asymptotic lines. The present manuscript completes the analysis of [Inverse Problems, Vol. 30, Number 3, Pages 035004]. Our result is useful to check if a source belongs or is closed to the bifurcation curve, where the localization in a noisy scenario is ambiguous.Comment: 11 pages, 3 figures, to appear in Fundamenta Informatica

A Geometric Approach to Sound Source Localization from Time-Delay Estimates

This paper addresses the problem of sound-source localization from time-delay estimates using arbitrarily-shaped non-coplanar microphone arrays. A novel geometric formulation is proposed, together with a thorough algebraic analysis and a global optimization solver. The proposed model is thoroughly described and evaluated. The geometric analysis, stemming from the direct acoustic propagation model, leads to necessary and sufficient conditions for a set of time delays to correspond to a unique position in the source space. Such sets of time delays are referred to as feasible sets. We formally prove that every feasible set corresponds to exactly one position in the source space, whose value can be recovered using a closed-form localization mapping. Therefore we seek for the optimal feasible set of time delays given, as input, the received microphone signals. This time delay estimation problem is naturally cast into a programming task, constrained by the feasibility conditions derived from the geometric analysis. A global branch-and-bound optimization technique is proposed to solve the problem at hand, hence estimating the best set of feasible time delays and, subsequently, localizing the sound source. Extensive experiments with both simulated and real data are reported; we compare our methodology to four state-of-the-art techniques. This comparison clearly shows that the proposed method combined with the branch-and-bound algorithm outperforms existing methods. These in-depth geometric understanding, practical algorithms, and encouraging results, open several opportunities for future work.Comment: 13 pages, 2 figures, 3 table, journa