3-D Near-Field Source Localization Using a Spatially Spread Acoustic Vector Sensor

This paper presents a new method for 3-D localization of an acoustic source signal by estimating its azimuth-angle, elevation-angle, and radial range. The proposed method exploits a spatially spread acoustic vector sensor, which is composed of a tri-axial velocity vector sensor and an isotropic pressure sensor. Unlike the spatially collocated case, the self-normalization of spatially spread acoustic vector sensors response is no longer independent of the source location, resulting in the inapplicability of the widely used self-normalization estimators [5], [30], [32]. The present work considers the near-field propagations path attenuation and phase difference among the sensor components and derives a source location estimation method without resorting to the self-normalization operation. Also, the proposed method is applicable to any non-free-space propagation models at arbitrarily unknown path-loss exponent. In comparison with the existing methods, where the velocity vector sensor is spatially collocated, the proposed method can offer improved performance estimation due to the inherent extension of the vector sensors spatial aperture in the spread structure.