A distributed design for multiple moving source positioning

Acoustic source localization has many important applications particularly for military tracking foreign objects. Even thoughWireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) have been developed, this localization problem remains a big challenge. A system for solving source localization must have the ability to deal with the problems of recorded convolved mixture signals while minimizing the high communication and computation cost. This paper introduces a distributed design for positioning multiple independent moving sources based on acoustic signals in which we focus on utilizing the relative information of magnitudes recorded at different sensors. The sensors perform preprocessing on the sensed data to capture the most important information before compressing and sending extracted data to the base. At the base, the data is uncompressed and the source locations are inferred via two clustering stages and an optimization method. Analysis and simulation results lead to the conclusion that our system provides good accuracy and needs neither much communication nor complex computation in a distributed manner. It works well when there exists high noise with Rayleigh multipath fading under Doppler effect and even when the number of independent sources is greater than the number of microphone sensors.