Patent ID: 9706298
Date: 2017-07-11
CPC Classifications: G01S,H04R

Claim:
1. An apparatus for localizing an acoustic source, comprising: a microphone array including a plurality of microphones to detect the origin of a sound source, the microphone array having a number of spatial dimensions D and the microphone array configured to temporally sample an acoustic signal to form a D+1 dimensional space-time matrix representation of the acoustic signal; and a processing unit coupled to the microphone array, the processing unit being configured to apply a D+1 dimensional Fourier transform to the D+1 dimensional space-time matrix representation of the acoustic signal to thereby generate a D+1 dimensional frequency matrix representing the spectrum in the form of the spectral distribution of temporal and spatial frequencies of the temporally sampled acoustic signal in a D+1 dimensional Fourier space, to determine a first peak in the spectrum corresponding to the D+1 dimensional frequency matrix, to determine a line extending from an origin of the D+1 dimensional Fourier space of the D+1 dimensional space-time matrix through the first peak, wherein the line includes predetermined points, to interpolate and/or extrapolate the D+1 dimensional frequency matrix onto the predetermined points to obtain a one-dimensional spectrum including frequency values given by temporal frequency values of the predetermined points, and applying a one-dimensional inverse Fourier transform to the one-dimensional spectrum to thereby compute a direction of arrival of the acoustic signal emitted by the source.