Vehicle Counting and Moving Direction Identification Based on Small-Aperture Microphone Array

The varying trend of a moving vehicle’s angles provides much important intelligence for an unattended ground sensor (UGS) monitoring system. The present study investigates the capabilities of a small-aperture microphone array (SAMA) based system to identify the number and moving direction of vehicles travelling on a previously established route. In this paper, a SAMA-based acoustic monitoring system, including the system hardware architecture and algorithm mechanism, is designed as a single node sensor for the application of UGS. The algorithm is built on the varying trend of a vehicle’s bearing angles around the closest point of approach (CPA). We demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method with our designed SAMA-based monitoring system in various experimental sites. The experimental results in harsh conditions validate the usefulness of our proposed UGS monitoring system.