Patent ID: 8817577

Claim:
A method for finding the trajectory of a gunshot projectile from acoustic signals, comprising the steps of: providing a plurality of spaced, distributed sensor nodes and a base station in communication with said nodes, sensing said acoustic signals at said nodes, converting said acoustic signals into digital signals at said nodes, separating, at said nodes, said digital signals into segments including at least one of a main shock wave segment, a main muzzle blast segment and other segments, calculating, at said nodes, a time of arrival of each said segment, extracting, at said nodes, features from each said segment, identifying, at said base station, each said time of arrival as one of a main shock wave and a main muzzle blast time of arrival from said features, and computing, at said base station, said trajectory from said main shock wave times of arrival, said trajectory including velocity and acceleration, including the substeps of selecting a reference node and calculation said trajectory from an observed time difference of arrival for said main shock wave segment for each node relative to said reference node, and said substep of calculating said trajectory including minimizing a cost function based on errors between said observed time differences of arrival for said nodes and theoretical time differences of arrival for said nodes generated from a model.