Acoustic Imaging for UAV Detection: Dense Beamformed Energy Maps and U-Net SELD
Journal: ArXiv.org
Year: 2025

We introduce a U-net model for 360° acoustic source localization formulated as a spherical semantic segmentation task. Rather than regressing discrete direction-of-arrival (DoA) angles, our model segments beamformed audio maps (azimuth &amp; elevation) into regions of active sound presence. Using delay-and-sum (DAS) beamforming on a custom 24-microphone array, we generate signals aligned with drone GPS telemetry to create binary supervision masks. A modified U-Net, trained on frequency-domain re