Parametric Estimations Based on Homomorphic Deconvolution for Time of Flight in Sound Source Localization System

Vehicle-mounted sound source localization systems provide comprehensive information to improve driving conditions by monitoring the surroundings. The three-dimensional structure of vehicles hinders the omnidirectional sound localization system because of the long and uneven propagation. In the received signal, the flight times between microphones delivers the essential information to locate the sound source. This paper proposes a novel method to design a sound localization system based on the single analog microphone network. This article involves the flight time estimation for two microphones with non-parametric homomorphic deconvolution. The parametric methods are also suggested with Yule-walker, Prony, and Steiglitz-McBride algorithm to derive the coefficient values of the propagation model for flight time estimation. The non-parametric and Steiglitz-McBride method demonstrated significantly low bias and variance for 20 or higher ensemble average length. The Yule-walker and Prony algorithms showed gradually improved statistical performance for increased ensemble average length. Hence, the non-parametric and parametric homomorphic deconvolution well represent the flight time information. The derived non-parametric and parametric output with distinct length will serve as the featured information for a complete localization system based on machine learning or deep learning in future works.