An introduction to sound localization

I'm in charge of a ~4h class about sound source localization for our 2nd year Intelligent System path of our Robotics master program.

This class is mainly about how to use a microphone array to localize a sound source. It starts with a carefull modelization of the problem, starting from the acoustic wave propagation to the signal processing equations of the problem.

Then, two simple approaches are highlighted: Time Delay Of Arrival (TDOA) estimation through correlation techniques, and beamforming approaches. Depending on the year, I also speaks about high resolution approaches (likek MUSIC) or binaural perception and localization.

The slides of the course are available here.

Practicals

One practical on beamforming is proposed, on the basis on a 8-microphones array. This allows to localization sources in real time directly from a jupyter notebook.