Multitarget tracking using acoustic arrays.
R. Daniel Costley, Jay E. Williams, Robert Charles Clark, Matthew A. Gray, Zachary Williams, Gary Harrington, William Garth Frazier, Jere Singleton · The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America · 2008
A tracking system has been developed, which consists of three or more five-microphone arrays. In previous experiments, these arrays have been deployed and used to track broadband, high-speed (subsonic) airborne, acoustic sources. Recent developments to this system have been made so that multiple acoustic sources can be tracked simultaneously. A field test was conducted this past year, which demonstrated this capability by tracking two low-flying learjets. The tracking system consisted of six acoustic arrays spaced approximately 400 m apart. The bearing angles from each array to the acoustic sources were determined from the blind source separator (BSS) algorithm. The BSS utilizes a mathematical propagation model along with an optimization technique, which minimizes the difference between the model and the measured data to yield a bearing to the target. The bearing angles from two or more arrays are transmitted to a master node, which uses this information to estimate the position, speed, and heading of the targets using a tracking algorithm based on the extended Kalman filter algorithm. The field test will be described and the results will be presented and discussed.