A Distributed Time-Difference of Arrival Algorithm for Acoustic Bearing Estimation

An algorithm for estimating bearing-to-target using time-difference of arrival (TDOA) in distributed acoustic sensor networks is presented. This algorithm is ad- vantageous in those cases where beamforming or other co- herent processing is not feasible, such as when microphone placement and time synchronization are uncertain, or when the individual nodes communicate by energy-constrained low-bandwidth links. The algorithm is applied to experi- mental, ground-truthed acoustic data, and full results are presented.