Use of the cross-power-spectrum phase in acoustic event localization

This work deals with the use of linear microphone arrays for acoustic event localaization in a noisy environment. Three techniques are investigated that allow delay estimation, namely Normalized Cross Correlation, LMS Adaptive Filters, CrossPower Spectrum Phase: they are combined with two bidimensional representations, in order to emphasize information that can be exploited for estimating position of both non-moving and moving acoustic sources.To compare the given techniques, different acoustic sources were considered, that generated events in different positions in space. Expressing performance in terms of accuracy of the wavefront direction angle, experiments showed that the CrosspowerSpectrum Phase based technique outperforms the other two.This technique provided very promising preliminary results also in terms of source position estimation. Finally, it resulted the most suitable for source tracking purposes.