Sequential sensor selection for the localization of acoustic sources by sparse Bayesian learning

This paper deals with the design of sensor arrays in the context involving the localization of a few acoustic sources. Sparse approximation is known to be effective to find the source locations, but it depends on different array characteristics, such as the number of sensors and the array geometry. The present paper tackles this array design problem under the form of a sequential sensor selection procedure. The proposed method alternates between two steps. One step involves a source localization estimator, given a current set of measurement points, to obtain the estimation variance. Then, the other step selects the new point where a future measurement will maximally decrease the variance from the previous step. As such, the procedure can be applied online. Both numerical and experimental studies are conducted in an indoor nearfield configuration. Results show that the proposed approach performs better than offline state-of-the-art methods, and the presented empirical study reveals a better robustness to the model mismatches originating from the room reflections.